Friends,
A few weeks ago, I talked with Stephen Garton on his podcast Fresh Aesthetic, and you can click here to listen to the whole conversation. I thought you’d like to read some of it, so I adapted selections into the transcript below. We talk about learning to let go of perfectionism, pursuing creative things for their own sakes, and how to define that slippery word “spirituality.” How would you define it?
Thanks to Stephen for the invitation, and I hope the conversation is encouraging to you all.
Take care,
Michael
Stephen: …It's so hard to know what you want in your 20s. This is when you've got the most energy and the most enthusiasm, generally speaking. Here's an example: An older person recently told me they wished they could play guitar—they should have done it. And my advice to them was why not now? Who cares if you're 75 or 80—just start and enjoy it! But then I don't take that same advice, because I'm in my mid 30s thinking, “oh that's over for me now. I can't pursue that anymore,” do you know what I'm saying? I understand my motivations, but it can feel too late. Do you have anything to say about that?
Michael: Oh I definitely do. The first thing I have to say is: I see you, Stephen—we are the same! I feel the same way. There are plenty of things I wish I had done differently. I wish I had learned Japanese when I was younger, I should have kept up Spanish, or I wish I had kept going with guitar earlier. I play by ear, and early on I learned the Nashville Number System [an auditory cheat code for 90% of pop music]. So I almost wish my mentor hadn't given me the Nashville Number System that gave me this shortcut, because now I don't really know how to read music for guitar.
It's easy to think that way as adults approaching middle age. But that's a significant part of adult learning: acknowledging the fact that yes, there's certain plasticity in the brain that only happens when we're young. There's certain opportunities that only happens when we're young. But we can always keep learning. Our brains might change, but we don’t have to stop.
I don’t want to live in a life where I'm 80 thinking, “I guess I'm not going to read that poem or write that poem” or whatever. I want to live in a world where I'm going to do that. I'm going to do that for the sake of play. I'm going to do that because I like it. Sure, I may not have the right circumstances and exposure and skill set to become the next great American novelist. But who cares? That's not the right motivation, anyway. Why not write a novel? That's what I want to explore: just do it! I don't like how we voluntarily conform to external expectations of perfection and celebrity and all that stuff.
Here's an example. In high school, Nickel Creek was one of my favorite bands. It still is one of my favorite bands of all time. As a teenager, I started to play the mandolin because the lead singer of Nickel Creek plays the mandolin. After a few months, I thought, oh I'm never going to be as good as him. So I put it aside. What's in that is perfectionism, right? Perfectionism at scale and a culture obsessed with celebrity.
Stephen: Obsessed with celebrity. Oh, it's so true, and it’s that marker of success. It’s that thing that we hold ourselves against and go, “if I'm not there, then my work is meaningless.” That's something I struggled with when I first started this podcast. In one of the first episodes I thought, does this even mean anything if nobody gives a shit about it? You know what I mean? Like, does it matter? Is it important? Is it doing anything? I'm just another white man. Like, we're a dime a dozen.
Michael: So that's been an ongoing point of reflection for me. I don’t want to cause harm with my own blindspots as a white man, and I want to actively look for those blindspots so I don’t unconsciously generate more harm. I want to do some good in the world, to leave it a little better than I found it. But yes: it's tricky. It's tricky and to actually just keep going with our creative pursuits and enjoy them for what they’re worth and not think about getting X amount of subscribers as external validation. It's so hard. And in some ways, we all have these temptations, and I have the same temptations on Substack, too.
Okay, let's talk shop for a second. So I started Still Life six years ago on TinyLetter, and it was really bare bones. I really liked that. I didn't have a ton of data on readership, and I found that valuable to exist in kind of fluent ignorance. I had no clue what was going on. And now with Substack, every week I'm looking at open rate and subscriber numbers. I'm seeing useful data there for sure, but it's way easier to drift into that mindset of trying to optimize the thing instead of doing a thing I love for its own sake, whether a thousand people read it or no one reads it.
The reason that we're doing this podcast and this newsletter is because we care and we want to explore the world and we want to share something with readers or listeners, whoever that might be. And that has to be enough. We have to be anchored in that, no matter the size of the audience, no matter the size of the impact.
Stephen: Yes, and there is that beauty in ignorance isn't there. Or the childlikeness of like, “I'm enjoying this and I'm having fun exploring and being curious and it's beautiful in that way.” I love that, Michael. I'm so grateful for that solidarity there because I feel so seen. In it with you, so thank you, thank you. So let's talk about spirituality. What does spirituality mean to you?
Michael: I feel like I should have a quippy answer for this since my tagline for Still Life is “a weekly letter on art and spirit!” You know, I think I'm learning I grew up misunderstanding the term.
For a long time, I confused spirituality and mental life, a life of the mind. I was thinking about spiritual ideas. I had a whole bookshelf, and I went to seminary. Like, I did a lot of thinking in my brain. So I think I misunderstood spirituality as something that's happening in my mind. I also, over many decades with my own struggles with depression gravitated towards a lot of spirituality like the dark night of the soul, desert spirituality, a lot of Buddhist writers and thinkers on suffering. I found myself gravitating towards that as well.
This is kind of a long, meandering answer, but what is spirituality? Let’s go back to the term: spirit means breath. When we're talking about spirituality, we're talking about that kind of vitalizing of our lives. Not what we're doing, not what we're imagining, but our being: our presence, the depth of that presence and how that depth reaches out and meets the depths of others and the Presence that is suffused throughout the world.
I get a little wary of how to talk about it beyond that, and that's why I'm drawn to poems and art. Poetry and art are a dimensional language that points to and protects a kind of mystery and presence at its center, which I find very valuable.
Stephen: It's a very open-ended question, isn't it? And a huge topic. So how has your journey in spirituality evolved over the years? Because we can often start in quite a simplistic place of just wanting to find something that's black and white, something that offers us safety and security. And then as we grow, it tends to evolve. But how has that evolved for you?
Michael: My earliest memories I have about spirituality was just a sense of desperation, internal mental anguish, and not knowing what was going on and just really striving in my Christian setting in Nashville—my church or my school or my family—just striving and looking for anything to help me not feel so shitty inside. So spirituality was very much came from that place of need and struggling with depression.
At the same time, I was also the leader in a praise band in the youth group. And spirituality was very much rooted in tradition, rooted in Christian faith and Christian community. So back to our conversation about perfectionism, was I good at just performing that role? It wasn't all inauthentic, but it was definitely laced with some pain, with looking for external validation.
And so what does spirituality mean for me now? Good Lord, I don't know. It's a live question for me, for sure. I'm having to come to terms with asking myself, “was that an experience of God?—or was that just an idea of God I had in my own mind that I'd inherited from other people?” The mystic Meister Eckhart has a great prayer: “God rid me of God.” I really resonate with that. Whatever these terms mean, they must always be pointing to a larger, deeper experience than what our language can say. So all of this has put me in a place where I'm doing a lot of soul searching right now.
Stephen: I think back to childhood, and I try and think about spiritual experiences that I had. And one that comes to mind is just sitting out in nature under a tree reading a book in the middle of the countryside. And it's just interesting: now that I look back, I'm like, that was everything! There's nothing else. Even though now it’s easy to think you've got to get the house, get the mortgage, get the kids, get the wife, whatever. I look back and I think: I already had it all. I have it all inside me and it's so big! I guess you can't really summarize that, can you?
Michael: I had a very similar experience. So you're talking about reading a book in nature and it reminded me of a moment that, looking back, I would call a spiritual experience. I was confronted by my own limitations, right in front of my face. I saw a play called Wit by the playwright Margaret Edson about an English teacher who was living a life of the mind at the expense of relationships around her. And in the play, you find out in the very beginning that she gets cancer and that she'll die at the end. And so the play is her talking through that experience, being confronted by her disastrous approach to the intellectual life, grieving how her life was not as full and rich as it could have been, and letting her suffering soften her to relationships and other people and emotions and presence.
I saw the play for a theology and culture seminar, and I was deeply affected by it. And so I decided to respond by tracking down and interviewing all the artists instead of doing a traditional research paper. I tracked down and interviewed the playwright, too. I just talked to them. I wanted to approach the arts in the same way that I was experiencing the play itself—through relationships. The life of the mind is powerful, but it can ultimately be limited when it's pursued for its own ends. And so this has really set me down a trajectory to kind of see spirituality and embodiment and relationships and creativity as woven together in ways that I'm still wrestling with and untangling today…
“The House of Belonging” by David Whyte
I awoke
this morning
in the gold light
turning this way
and that
thinking for
a moment
it was one
day
like any other.
But
the veil had gone
from my
darkened heart
and
I thought
it must have been the quiet
candlelight
that filled my room,
it must have been
the first
easy rhythm
with which I breathed
myself to sleep,
it must have been
the prayer I said
speaking to the otherness
of the night.
And
I thought
this is the good day
you could
meet your love,
this is the gray day
someone close
to you could die.
This is the day
you realize
how easily the thread
is broken
between this world
and the next
and I found myself
sitting up
in the quiet pathway
of light,
the tawny
close grained cedar
burning round
me like fire
and all the angels of this housely
heaven ascending
through the first
roof of light
the sun has made.
This is the bright home
in which I live,
this is where
I ask
my friends
to come,
this is where I want
to love all the things
it has taken me so long
to learn to love.
This is the temple
of my adult aloneness
and I belong
to that aloneness
as I belong to my life.
There is no house
like the house of belonging.
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