Cogs to artists. Tribes were connected and held sacred as one big family. Once a tribe was too big to call a family, it split in two, and one tribe moved to a different location and established another settlement.
The Industrial Age connected the world and made it rich and fruitful, but that feeling of a familiar bond beyond the family vanished. The Big Fish had the power; most humans were mere cogs in the system. The Information Age brought us the internet and connection online. Production and distribution are available to all. Cogs turn to artists. And artists connect the world.

Where will you hide if there is nowhere to hide? The information age, with the leverage of the internet, puts production and distribution at your fingertips. Power is scary; it is safer to hide behind ‘it is impossible’ or ‘I don’t know.’ That game is long over. The internet removed all the middlemen. The record labels, the bookstores, the art galleries, the venture capital, and the news channels. You’ve got the microphone. You own your art. To ignore and hide is almost a sin.

As long as you are searching, you are not finding. If you must write, you must write.
If you must express, you must express. There is no other way. Pick an outlet, pick a craft, and practice every day. Find the courage to share your work. Then do it again. If you do not know who your work is for, share your work selflessly, and your people will find you. What you seek seeks you. Just take action. Find an outlet and create what you must create, then share your creation in one or more forms on the internet, not to participate in being social but to establish your identity as an artist; as you believe in yourself more, you will share more easily of your craft.
The best (purest) works are the hardest to share; doubt kicks in, and you run away and perhaps delete everything and come back anew when the storm has settled. Eventually, you stop running and share your work because that is what you do, and that is who you are. Welcome to the life of an artist.
Feedback at this stage is futile. God is the way; call it a gut feeling. Pure work pops in and does not knock. The only feedback that will be of use is from the group you seek to delight. Ignore all other opinions. Sometimes, ignore their opinions, too.
Who you create for will be established by sharing your most intimate works. As long as you are searching, you are not finding.
You must put your creations into the world. You must take action. You must poke the universe. Your creations are your meditations. Your disciplines. Your ritual. Let’s call them ‘meditations of an artist’.

Meditations of an artist. Put your point of view on display. Stand for something. Be specific. Genre matters. Delight someone.
Not everyone.
What is the gift you bring to the world? Once you know why you exist, everything becomes simple. The noise subsides, and you can quietly serve your people. Always remember, as long as you seek, you shall not find. Do and become. Create and learn. Find and serve.

A life of service. It is not about you. And as you focus on serving others, you uncover more and more of yourself. Perhaps it was all about you to begin with. Serving others is your way home. As you serve others, you heal the world.

What a delight. The Industrial Age is over. The Big Fish are dying. You own the means of production.
You own the means of distribution.
No one can stop you but you. No gates. No keepers.
What will you uniquely provide? Who will you uniquely delight?

The choice is yours. Every emotion/mood is a problem; the answer is the album/ the body of work. Art is for the recipient. A specific someone. One you seek to delight with your specific work. You intend to cause change to a specific someone. You choose who you serve, but you need to choose. Selfish art, on the other hand, has no intention to serve or help. It is created selfishly without the purpose of delighting someone specific. That work will find no footing and fade away in all the noise. It won’t give money or fame to the creator of the art. Selfish artists often crave money and fame but fail to notice their selfishness is precisely why they get left behind. Selfish work is about the creator of the work. Selfless work is for the person the artist seeks to change. The choice is yours.

Real commerce is gift-giving. Give gifts. That’s the game.
The more you give, the more you become the artist you seek to be. Your songs, your works of art, your paintings, and your pamphlets are gifts. Gift-giving is real commerce, given that the gift is complete work. When creating complete work, you give and you get at the same time. When complete work finds its host, it appears effortlessly. The host simply steps aside. The host feels he has not touched the work, simply brought it to the world. The host steps aside and conceives the gift. The receiver steps aside and consumes the gift. There is no commerce. And that is real commerce.
As gifts are received and consumed alone, they need no advocate. Complete work always finds its way to where it is needed. Real artists perhaps call that helping hands.
It is important to understand that selfish artists will never touch complete work. Instead of gift-giving, they participate in hole-filling. The work is about them and their story. From their art, they hope to get something. By that, the gift eludes them, and they grow bitter making art. Perhaps what they make is not art at all.
The intention behind your creation matters. Simply give your gift to God and choose a life of service. Your art can be your gift. Serve the world instead of filling holes. The only spiritual discipline you need is gift-giving.
Real artists give gifts. They have come to heal parts of themselves that make them available to real creation. Real creation is complete creation, the healing arts.
Gifts don’t leave the world. They are recognized as gifts by everyone; hence, they are cherished.
Real art is. God is. And real commerce is gift-giving.

Fame. It’s just a collection of songs that makes an artist. It’s just a body of work that makes an artist. It is not the pictures of your dogs. Look at the channels on the internet as your radio stations and art galleries. They serve a function to connect you with the right hearts. You can either win on quality or fame. But fame follows quality in time. In other words, quality gets you fame; fame doesn’t get you quality.

And it’s free. There is no better marketing than creating and sharing your work. More work leads to better work, which leads to drawing & understanding your audience, which leads to serving your audience better still. Along the way, emotions settle, and you become the artist you seek to be.

Break your chains and make great art. As you tone it down to make your father feel more comfortable. As you tone it down to make your friends not laugh. As you tone it down to keep the voices quiet. As you review your work in all its quirks, the strong points, and the solid stance—you realize you will offend someone—perhaps you were too vulnerable. Before you rub out all the beauty, consider my friend that it’s not for them.
Great art rarely comes with a feeling of safety. Great art always cuts people the wrong way. Some, that is. But for the ones it’s really for—it heals their wounds and mends their hearts. Break your chains and make great art.

That is as close to god as you can get down here. The only spiritual discipline you need is a life of service to others. Your work changes when the work is not about you anymore. You give yourself fully to your work, and you disappear. That is as close to god as you can get down here.

God, and art that teaches. Music teaches me to create through being. I found my canvas in songs and my heart paints. When it paints, I plunge into the music, and the music carries me. The act of creating music is the greatest joy and gift that I get to experience. Oh, and the joy of sharing it, that intimate experience, when real touches real, and I disappear. I believe in art, the artist disappears. Because of this, the art can come alive in the receiver of the art because it was conceived alone. It is like it takes you somewhere, and you trust it enough to leave yourself at the door. You don’t meditate; it meditates on you. But that only happens if the artist is not while creating art. Art creates itself. Creation births itself. Poetry is God’s laughter and the afterthought of laughing rings in my ears as I write these words. The laughing is not writing the words, but the words are surely laughing at the reader who got lost in them. Creation itself creates. Creation creates itself. It doesn’t need a creator to play with itself. The playing is the play, and the child and the father all in one laugh. There is no joke told or joke heard because there is neither the joke nor the joker. And That is precisely the joke of existence — the riddle of riddles. Holy Ghost’s laughing in unison. The arts’ purpose, therefore, is to knock on your head so hard that the knock itself is ringing through one ear and out the other. Teaching, or art that teaches, is the art of describing what is underneath the question, and it might plunge you into the answer because the goal of the true teacher is to take away the question and leave you vulnerable in God.

Listen to this week's podcast episode HERE.