The Most Beautiful Thing We Can Experience. . . .

is the mysterious.
When our friend, Rene Descartes, about 350 years ago, initiated the Age Of Reason with his linear and orderly Cartesian way of viewing the world, he did me, and you, and all of us, a great dis-service. He and the powers that followed him, assumed the natural world was an out-of-control, hysterical, chaotic mess, needing to be contained put in the box. (He actually called his treatise "The Passions of the Soul", then he denounced those passions as worthless!) Those men seemed so scared of their irrational, natural selves. Those thinking men, afraid of their own emotions and their intuitive sides.
I have always been much more connected to the intuitive, creative, irrational side of my own brain. I've been reading Jill Bolte Taylor's amazing book, Stroke of Insight, where she describes what happened to her when a stroke essentially killed the rational side of her brain, leaving the intuitive creative side in control.
She says it was Nirvana, that she felt connected to all life.
I tried living in the rational world, with its logic and rules and explanations for everything. I tried a career where each line had to be in just the right place, where I sat chained to a desk each day like a gerbil running on an endless wheel, just to get that paycheck every two weeks.
No.
It was not for me.
I choose wonder and magic and irrational exuberance every time.
It might not make sense in a capitalistic, money-means-all world, but look where that ideology has gotten us -- consumption and greed, and a non-sustainable mentality which damages the environment and our own spirits.
I'd rather lie on the grass and be enchanted by images in Mother Earth's clouds than turn on the tv and be told I will be prettier, smarter, better if I just buy this and that product.
PULEASE.
I choose mystery.
and magic.
and irrational nature.
and ART and CREATIVITY over the reasonable rational choices in life which they say are "safer" but really are just denying the creative self.
and I think I am happier for it.
and you will be too - now go work in your journals.

(and if your rational self has many reasons not to make art, if your wallet says you don't have the time or money to "waste", just laugh and crank up some good music, gather some collage materials and juicy markers, and make a mess. . . . you'll feel so good!)