Walking away from religious belief - my story

I grew up as a quasi- Episcopalian, sang in the junior choir. When I was 14, I was invited by a classmate to a baptist vacation bible school where I got “SAVED” i.e. born again as they say. I was an over-imaginative and socially alienated teen, happy to hear somebody loved me.... And when I say over imaginative, I was the sort, who as a child of three or four years old, had conversations with an imaginary species of “pookiebell,” a sort of small fairy creature that tended the ferns. It wasn't so much delusion as a strong creative streak that needed guidance.

In my teenage loneliness I conjured a deep emotional connection to Jesus and to god as I imagined their love for me. And this was the attraction.  I started going to a baptist church, and felt accepted there, and began writing christian folk songs. This belief conveniently kept me from having to make the usual teenage decisions about sex and drugs, gave me a ready-made group of people who were supposed to care about me and another far more  authoritative imaginary presence to talk to. After high school, I went to Philadelphia College of Bible as a music student. (Subsequent name changes include Philadelphia Biblical University. and now Cairn University)

The first chink in the old armor came one day when I was out passing out "Jesus Saves" booklets in Rittenhouse Square. I met a Hindu man and we spent some three and a half hours trying to convert each other.. My mind churned. We couldn't both be right, one of us had to be wrong, I thought. But he was every bit as sincere and devout as I was, knew his own holy books just as well...

The summer I got a job as a camp counselor at a religious “ranch” I was brought up short again when a fellow counselor told all the children that their mommies and daddies would burn in hell unless they came to believe. The terrible anguish of these children, who assumed the words of that counselor to be literal, immediate truth - starkly framed the barbarism inherent in the concept of hell.  It was the beginning of the end of fundamental evangelical Christianity for me. I no longer could believe in this version of god. Despite this, I returned to college in the fall - I needed to figure out what to do instead, how to change direction.

After one more year (three total) at bible collage, going through the motions, trying to understand - I dropped out and became an avid non-christian, interested in whatever I could read about religion(s). For many years I told the census takers I was a pantheist, a pagan, a  heathen. For a short while I I was into a sort of new age mumbo-jumboism & reincarnation,  and then dabbled in home-styled American buddhism & insight meditation. My religious opinions were further fleshed out by six years working for churches as a mezzo-soprano, including four years working for a Roman catholic church. I was a non-christian, quasi-atheist at the time, and my immediate musical bosses knew it.

Over the years I have done a lot of thinking about religion and it's creator - the human mind. At the core of each religion, there is always a set of people called mystics. When you read about their experiences they are remarkably similar even in religions that call each other heretics and infidels. I think the similarity is because a “mystical experience” is a brain-state that can happen to anyone who's brain chemistry gets bent in a particular way. It is a state accessible through mediation practice BUT it is a physical phenomenon, not a revelation of a god or gods and not a product of any supernatural process. Religious states of communion, thankfulness or “oneness” that often accompany prayer or meditation are also brain-based and beautiful even apart the common religious labels applied to them. They are natural states of the human brain.

Apparently, I have a atheistic and naturalistic view which excludes divinities as well as the supernatural.. Naturalists see no evidence for the supernatural, and no need for it either as all things, both interior and exterior, arise from the natural physical world. I am also a secular humanist. Secular humanists think that human beings should, without a god or a religion, try to live the best life they can using the power of reason to realize their unique abilities and thereby contribute to the good of society, mankind in general and to the life and history of the planet.

- Mar Walker

PAINTING: The Glaring Irregularity again

Update Mar. 9, 2011  This painting drives me to drink well, coffee.

VOLCANO PIC CHANGES AGAIN!! And Again! And Again. And Again.

Updated Jan 20, 2011 -->  "The Glaring Irregularity!" This painting has gone from just odd, with a Greek classically clad family standing at an angle, to bizarrely dragonesque, to google earth meets black velvet, to Google earth meets VanGoh to lava spill in candyland. At this point it is all about undulation, oscillation, periodicity somehow. Everything comes in waves in this pic now.  Although I like this version in someways, I miss the very first version with all the crazy eccentric lava.  Sigh. Let's give it a few days and see....

I am beginning to understand something. I need to preserve the eccentricities somehow, but in a way that serves the overall composition. I am most likely to use this cronic revisionism when I don't have an overall composition in mind at the start of the painting. Scroll down for pervious versions.

PREVIOUS UPDATE  -- I have altered this so many freaking times and still I am not statisfied with this painting. I would like to be able to throw it out. But I just can't. I need to nail it down in some way that pleases me for more than five minutes. But in the night version here, the smoke bothers me. I want something to unify the composition. ( I think because of the previous tentacles picture it became parallel lines.. hmmm.)

After  seeing pictures and videos of Mr Etna erupting in Italy -  I just had to revise  this picture!!!  MORE RED!!!  that's what  Eli Cleary told me.  Okay I am not yet done with it..... and of course I am nuts.  I just can't seem to stop. I actually showed the second to last version of this. But it still bothered me. Someone said the lava looked like a dragon. And I could see it didn't follow the land contures but seemed vertical somehow.  SO here is yet another incarnation of the same canvas. I might change the title too.

PREVIOUS UPDATE:  Below is the version that I showed at Artwell in 2010: Between The Darkness and The Deep. What promoted me to change that one is I couldn't get the lava to lie down on the landscape.. hmmm. I don't know what's come over me, painting a semi-readable landscape. My usual fair is oddities like the very first version at the bottom .

I like  the early eccentric version a lot. It is a  completely different painting that I wish I still had!   Apparantly I am painting the eccentricity right out them I think and I don't know why! I seem to be going though a pseudo reality phase....  It might have to do with my new reading glasses.  I had  quite a stigmatism in the left eye which some new glasses correct. When I first used them, every thing on the right seemed bigger than it should. In the original version, what prompted me to begin changing things was I could figure out what the people were standing on. Then I couldn't figure out where the horizon was since the Island was tilted. Probably due my stigmatism.  I guess my brain had learned to compensate..... To the left is the lava that looked like a dragon. To the right is my favorite version:

Painting: Cold Quiet Tranquil

There is a feeling I get when I look out the window at night and snow is falling, relentless and silent.   When my dog Oggi was alive. we often took late walks in falling snow. Sometimes I still do. In the dark snow, I feel expansively alert and connected to everything, yet also filled with a strange sense of deep peace. For a few years I lived in Maine, so I have a passing acquaintance with the desolate beauty of winter in the north country. This is an older style landscape, a bit hallmark for my taste.  It belongs to my mom who asked me recently  "Is there ever a painting of  yours that you are actually finished with?"

When I look at it now, I feel that same peaceful sense as when I look out the window in a quiet spell of falling snow ....  So yes, I think it is done.  It's oil on 8x10 canvas board.

Painting: Busy No. 2 - Tentacles

In darkness - who knows what is waving its tentacles frantically about? This is a sort of an obsessive vision. Once I started I couldn't let it go.  The style began with a previous work Cat Dreams, which is more readable, and notches that style it to a frantic, uncomfortable rush. It's oil on canvas board. Like the previous bit "In the Museum" I am not expecting a lot of folks will like it. But some how I needed to make it anyway. Below are earlier stages of the work where I envisioned the lines as highways, even added cars. Some may prefer these but I favor the end result at the right.

 

In The Museum: on our relationship to art

Our relationship to "art" (visual, literary, musical, theatrical etc) is complex, if we have one that is. Some don't ever look . If they did they might be surprised and find they relate to at least some of what they see. Is there possibility for us in works of art? A vision of  our humanity of our world of beauty or ugliness?  Is there a nobility we aspired to but didn't realize? A tarnished part we hide from everyone?   Are we more alive after facing and acknowledging these odd truths about ourselves? Just asking questions.

This is the first of a batch of works I've finished recently  but have not yet posted. This is an odd one.  It's oil on canvas board.  Below is a very rough sketch of mine on which it is based, though it differs considerably from the sketch. As stated, the visual metaphor here are about our interaction with art our relationship to art.

- Mar  Walker

2010: art shows R us

In the beginning of 2010 I wrote - "Let is be a year of music!"  Instead for me 2010 was a year of Art. It was the first time in decades I showed my artwork in a Gallery.

,First I showed  a drawing called Aspects of the Self one drawing at the Frieght Street Gallery during their May Day Festival show: This was an amazing thing. No one had seen my work, except digitally, in years!

Later in May I showed one of my polymer faces during the Artwell Rocks show in Torrington. I was on a roll whoohoo!   The work was called "The British Invasion: 40 Years Later."

During the summer, at the request of Victoria Munoz, I brought three works to hang at Freight Street during one of her poetry Salons there. I brought my Dancing Poems collage, Hair's on Fire (an oil pastel) and  Water & Fire, a digital painting.

For Artwell's Landscape and Still Life in Septemeber, I brought three works I had finished recently, all oil paintings on canvas board: Between the Darkness and the Deep, Rural Free Delivery, and River of Sky.

I created a special work for Artwell's DaDa show in November. New Era: the Eagle Egg Shell Breaks, and a found art peice  called congress which consisted of twisted spring wires from an old couch.  It's been a good year!

In honor of the eclipse: Moon Madness Strikes

In honor of the eclipse: This column appeared years and years ago in the Ridgefield Press, back when I was a reporter there .

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Moon Madness Strikes Reporter

by Mar Walker

Some Ridgfielders had a perfect view of last Sunday's lunar eclipse.

``Did you watch the eclipse?'' I kept asking friends expectantly.

``Too cold.''

``Too late at night.''

``Saw one last year.''

Like many other disinterested parties around town,  I've always figured the stars and the planets could carry on perfectly well without me. And what I had planned for this particular event was to skip the whole thing and stay in bed.

Fortunately I was awake at midnight. On impulse, I put on some shoes and threw a coat over my pajamas. I was curious I guess, and it seems I've been cheating myself all these years. It's like the Grand Canyon was right off the porch and I'd never even looked.

Out the back door I went at a little past midnight. There was a bite out of the full moon already, just a little nibble really. It was a perfect night, utterly clear. The bright moon washed the night sky to medium grey and crisscrossed the yard with shadows. Bare trees swayed in parallel. Black limbs juggled stars in leafless hands like fussy husbands rearranging Christmas lights.

And of course there was music - the brook out back, full from the day's rain, murmured on its way to the Norwalk River. Over the scuttling of leaves and over the wistful sweetness of wind chimes on the back porch, ever so slowly, the round silhouette of Earth stretched over the moon.

As moonlight dimmed, starlight and darkness heightened. I felt cold and alive, shifting weight from one foot to the other, craning my neck like some fat bird in a courtship dance as I stared straight up.

My cat wailed at the backdoor to come out and as I turned, momentarily facing further North, I saw two bright shooting stars, one right after the other. The very long, very bright trails streaked down and I imagined I could hear the sizzle of air as they fell.

A little numb now, I ran into the kitchen and put on water for tea. I wrapped a scarf around my neck and rummaged around for a pair of binoculars. Leaving the tea to steep I went back outside.

What a revelation - with the binoculars I could make out the dark spots on the crescent of moon still showing. I studied a pale smudge to the lower right of the moon and found a cluster of stars. I focused on stars and found where I thought I saw one or two, there were entire flocks of stars drowned out by ambient light.

Alone under such surprising immensity, many thoughts came. About the fear this ancient sky-dance had once inspired. Once, before there were electric lights and television, it must have been a natural thing for men and woman to study the night sky, feeling its beauty, dwarfed by its enormity.

Now we hold nightly vigils before the TV's glitzy banality - consumer culture flashing across an 22 inch screen. What a contrast in pacing and depth when compared to an eclipse.   Our attention span is jaded by 30 second commercials. Our awe is reserved for special effects.

Instead of stepping outside and experiencing nature firsthand, we watch the highlights, rebroadcast to us as we sit on comfortable couches in warm living rooms. I know that I myself am like that. Most people I know are too.

A sudden noise caught my attention as a bright light appeared moving quickly along from the direction of New York. In the binoculars, red and white lights flanked the slender shadow of a jet. As it drew closer, low in the sky, I could see the glow of its engines spewing eerie white smoke, twin rockets in the dark. The sky is amazing and despite our drawbacks, we and our technologies are amazing too.

At one thirty a.m., when the moon had dimmed to a glimmer, and my hands had grown numb holding the metal glasses, I went in and drank my mint tea and rubbed my neck. I found if I lay flat on the floor beneath the kitchen window, body stretched under the table, I could see the moon easily without having to twist my neck. Lying on linoleum, bathed in the emerging moon, I fell asleep.