How Creativity is Nourishment for the Soul Ep 150 | Guest: Alon Ferency

  In this episode of Evolving Humans, Julia Marie and Alon Ferency explore the profound connection between spirituality and creativity. 

They discuss how engaging in creative activities can be a spiritual adventure, offering insights into the role of art in deepening one's faith and understanding of the divine. 

Alon, a creativity consultant, counselor, and coach, shares his journey from being a rabbi to helping artists unlock their potential. He emphasizes the importance of play, attention, and the unique expression of one's soul through art. 

The conversation delves into the idea that creativity is an inherent part of our spiritual nature and that by embracing our creative impulses, we can experience a deeper connection to the universe.

 Alon also touches on the concept of God as a dungeon master, guiding us through a world of possibilities and surprises. 

The episode encourages listeners to engage in creative activities, highlighting that the stakes have never been lower and that making something today can be a powerful way to nourish the soul.  

Thank you for listening to Evolving Humans!

For consultations or classes, please visit my website: www.JuliaMarie.us

Evolving Humans with Julia Marie is now on YouTube, and will offer more than the podcast episodes there, so give us a "SUBSCRIBE"!

https://www.youtube.com/@EvolvingHumans731

You can find my book, Signals from My Soul: A Spiritual Memoir of Awakening here:

https://tinyurl.com/Book-Signals-from-My-Soul

Transcript

Julia Marie (00:00):
We're talking about the intersection of spirituality and creativity on evolving humans. Are you curious about how creativity can be a spiritual adventure? Stay tuned to find out. 
Welcome to Evolving Humans, the podcast for Awakening Souls. I'm your host, Julia Marie. Settle in and get ready for another spirited conversation, creativity consultant, counselor, and coach. Rabbi Alan Ferency is a cross country bicyclist,
peace Corps volunteer author, concert producer, chaplain and Dungeon master. He served the Hesca Muna Synagogue, Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival. Burt Reynolds, the last movie star and was the first treasurer of the Community Coalition against Human Trafficking. In his spare time, Allah learns drums,
reads science fiction novels and plays on a soccer team. Well, I don't know if he has any spare time, but welcome Alan, to Evolving Humans. I'm looking forward to our conversation. Me too,
Alon Ferency (01:33):
Julia.
Julia Marie (01:35):
I always like to ask the same first question of all my guests, and that question is what was it like growing up in your house?
Alon Ferency (01:45):
Well, I don't want to throw anyone under the bus, but it wasn't an easy childhood as a parent. Now I have a lot of forgiveness and grace from my parents' shortcomings as I think we all ought to. I mean, I suppose there are cases of abuse and addiction that really traumatize a family system. My parents just had anxiety
and were young and didn't know what to do with me. I was precocious, socially awkward, had an enormous amount of questions. I think it was overwhelming. I think a child's curiosity can be overwhelming at times. I have a wife who is an engineer and sometimes I'll say, just go ask your mom.
She'll know that's her domain. You can ask me stuff about God. I have a younger sister who is very talented, especially musically. She's a concert, was almost a concert cellist, so in some ways I was in her shadow in some ways as the elder, she was in my shadow.
(02:42):
I started theater probably by the end of elementary school and was in theater a lot through junior high and into high school, although apparently I got kicked out of a player two because I memorized everyone's lines. I loved Marvel comics and the band and Dungeons and Dragons, which I look back on as the nerd
triumvirate, Stephen Colbert says to play Dungeons and Dragons. Then you needed three friends who could keep a secret, which was I was part of that generation. It was not public. What else was true of my childhood? I was ungainly and in athletic. I learned to love soccer later in life. I used to go running with
my dad and on weekend bicycle rides. In fact, my kids are starting to do things like that with me, which I really love. And my son has a friend whose friend is a serious cyclist with his dad, which really hit me.
(03:34):
Well, we lived very comfortably. I don't think we were wealthy, but we lived in a town that was becoming wealthy. Our house was wonderful, much bigger than the house I live in now, and we would have cousins come stay with us occasionally, like emigres from the former, so union twice, and one other
cousin who was between jobs and they would live in the guest room or in the basement for three to five months at a time. We had a Israeli exchange student stay with us for another four months. It was a lot of things I would like to repeat for my kids and then some things that I'm working on differently, and I
would say my wife is an excellent mother. She succeeds in some of the places my parents struggled, and I'm sure our kids will have their own injuries.
Julia Marie (04:23):
It sounds like life wasn't too bad in your house growing up.
Alon Ferency (04:28):
It was interesting.
Julia Marie (04:29):
Yeah, there you go. Eclectic. You might
Alon Ferency (04:31):
Say. I was very eclectic. I mean, I think there just was less room for that in the 1980s. That's
Julia Marie (04:37):
True.
Alon Ferency (04:38):
I was living in a majority white Catholic and Protestant town, so being Jewish, I was unusually dark skinned, which is hard to imagine now because I'm at best olive complected, but it was, someone made a comment about it in a report card once, which I can't fathom. Having a bagel in the early eighties was
very esoteric and unusual. So the world has changed around us. It was a hard youth, but with a lot of good memories too.
Julia Marie (05:11):
A comment on your report card actually written by a teacher about the color of your skin. Yes.
Alon Ferency (05:18):
Alan is a clever, curious, darkly complected young man. Yeah. You're not supposed to say, I don't think you were supposed to say that in 1984,
Julia Marie (05:28):
You've talked about your raising. Can you share a little bit about your personal artistic journey and the role that art and creativity plays in your life?
Alon Ferency (05:38):
Well, it's taken me a long time to understand without arrogance, but almost as objectively, I'm just an unusually creative person. I have a lot of odd and idiosyncratic ideas. I am so far aligned as a neurotypical, but just garden variety, quirky. I always loved performing arts. We used to go to performing
arts summer camp. I was just writing a little about how much I loved to sing as a kid, and that went away for a long time. I think I was probably embarrassed about my singing voice. I certainly tried to play instruments, but because my sister was so expert at cello, it never took off. I've never been a significant
visual artist, but among my favorite things that I have done, I was a DJ in college, jazz DJ in college. I've loved theater. I loved filmmaking, especially editing. I do a lot of nonfiction writing still, though I haven't in the past couple of years as much.
(06:36):
I love to dance, but not with any stage presence. Just Zumba classes and ballroom classes, and I was in a ballet my final year of college, a ballet of Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd, which I wish there were a  recording of because my sister still remembers the costume was like a pink singlet with one strap, very
revealing. Her best friend talks about it. Still, there's no documentary evidence that I know of. Yeah, I've just always loved performing. But I think what's been interesting is I've sort of made my way in my career
is if I'm going to be someone who loves writing and performing, but not someone who is excellent at any one particular discipline, how do I engage in the arts? And I was never going to have a painting in a gallery or a name above the credits in a movie, but I always wanted to be around arts making and a part of
adjacent to connected to arts making.
(07:37):
So in my twenties, after I had been in the Peace Corps, I went to LA to work in the music business, did a lot of odd jobs, did not enjoy it mostly, but had a lot of neat, neat and difficult experiences as one does in their twenties. And then I folded that into becoming a rabbi. I had been in la, my best friend helped me
think about future career steps, and it was something I'd always understood that I wanted to and probably would do, was go into the rabbi in it because rabbis had always been the people I looked up to and people I admired wanted to become, wanted to do for other children and other people what they had done for me.
And so I was ordained in 2010 after eight years of graduate study, including education and teaching pedagogy, chaplaincy training, had met my wife and married my wife during that period, and then came
out to Knoxville, Tennessee where I served a pulpit for 12 years.
(08:34):
And during that period, you mentioned Burt Reynolds movie was filmed in town, and I got to kind of be an adjunct religious consultant on that when they did a scene at the synagogue. I got to work at Bonnaroo a couple of years and I had in seminary, worked at a drug and alcohol rehab and gotten to work with
someone and help them connect their musical background to a prayer life. And in 2009, that was not a possible career, but I knew that's what I wanted to do, and it was only with Zoom and Covid and the truncating of distances and distances becoming telescopes such that you and I can talk to each other very
easily over zoom and so forth, that it became possible to envision a career outside a major urban center that engaged me with artists in Austin and Vancouver and Philadelphia and Los Angeles and Boston.
Julia Marie (09:22):
It's my personal belief there's an artist or a spirit within each of us that cries out for expression in some form or fashion.
Alon Ferency (09:34):
I don't know. I can't make that claim. I haven't met everybody. I do know I met someone once I worked with someone who claimed that he didn't like music, and I was a little worried that he might not have a soul. But I mean there must be some people like that. I mean, I think that Einstein and Julia Cameron talk
about this woundedness of the inner child that we get that stuff suppressed. Is it possible not to have it or just to have it so suppressed that it's deadened or at least extremely dormant? I don't know. And I don't know as I constructed my idea of what would be my practice with artists, I didn't know that I wanted to
try to excavate that with people. I, for at least in the beginning, want to just work with people who understand themselves to be artists of some form, because I wasn't sure I had the capacity to help an attorney who liked to watercolor on Sunday mornings become an artist. I just didn't know that I had that
strength. And maybe I do, maybe I don't. Does everyone have art in them? I don't know. I mean, I only have that one example of someone saying they don't like music. To think that some people can totally reject the creative, but he was also an entrepreneur, so in some ways he had a creative impulse.
(10:51):
Yeah, yeah. So I don't know. And then I've had these long discussions with clients and colleagues about what is art? What is the extent of my practice? What are the people with whom I want to work and serve?
Is parenthood a kind of art? Is all creativity inherently art or is there creativity that is non-art? My mother is very creative with spreadsheets. Is that art? I kind of sit on the fence about, someone once said their art
is dog walking, and I was like, it's not the kind of art that I'm doing, but to them I understand that it feels in the same way. I really can't say I don't know what the boundary is. I've been struggling with that since I started this work.
Julia Marie (11:32):
Actually, that boundary that you were describing as you're talking about it, let's just say to me it feels very fluid. There isn't an edge there. I made my statement based on my own belief that we're all wired the same. We come from a creator that made our vehicles. And so if the potential is within one, then it's by
extrapolation must be present in the other somewhere.
Alon Ferency (12:08):
Yes. I mean I agree with that theologically, and there is a Jewish prayer about how wonderful God is to have made people so diverse. So is it possible that we are created so diverse that there are certain elements that we assume to be universal that I couldn't even say? I mean also having traveled a bit,
especially in the Peace Corps, Sub-Saharan Africa, things that one would have thought are universal aren't necessarily, so I'm not sure. I'm curious, and it's always been a part stretch for my life, whether it's through travel or through the past being a pastor or working in the arts to understand more deeply what is
the common human heritage across geography and even through time and what is idiosyncratic to time and place. And I've been enjoying reading Seneca and the stoics and the Bible, partly because they teach us like, oh, these problems are old human beings have always struggled with questions of meaning and
love and harm, sadness and excitement. They're not new questions. What is a good family as you almost began with? But some things must be distinct. I don't know yet. I'll let you know at the end of my life what I come up
Julia Marie (13:27):
With. Well, I'll meet you on the other side and we'll,
Alon Ferency (13:29):
I'll meet you on the other side. We'll have a discussion. We'll bring in Jimi Hendrix and
Julia Marie (13:32):
Beethoven. There you go. Oh yes, please. We could have quite a band.
Alon Ferency (13:37):
Yeah,
Julia Marie (13:38):
I did visit your website and words you have right there on that homepage really resonated with me.
Creativity is a spiritual adventure. So what do you mean by that statement?
Alon Ferency (13:52):
Well, that was chat, GPT, that it's not chat, GPT, stop. I don't know. I think the idea of spiritual adventure as a category is something that grew within me towards the end of my time in the pulpit because I felt that
my pulpit and pulpits and nonprofits in general can be less adventurous and I knew that was lacking in my life. I don't really know what a spiritual adventure is, except it can be something as simple as a walk in the
woods or a long conversation or an hour of silence on a park bench. I certainly think painting is a spiritual adventure. If, I mean, I guess I'd have to be able to better describe what I think of as a spiritual adventure
because it's not an adventure like whitewater rafting. It doesn't necessarily raise your pulse. It might be an inward adventure or an adventure outward toward awe and majesty of the Grand Canyon or the solar system.
(14:49):
And I think listening to Coltrane or going to see Turner paintings or great movies can be their own kind of adventure where you're transported to places without proper words and experiences of awe and mystery and what they call the sublime and a sense of transcendence in that we are a spiritual adventure
to me. Okay, this would be probably the primary example would be looking at the ocean, that sense of feeling small, but also feeling safe in that smallness that my problems aren't so big because the ocean is so vast and nearly eternal. People describe that when they raft down the Grand Canyon and on the Colorado
River, the strata of sediment for a billion and a half years, that sense of smallness in the history of time, that's a spiritual adventure. So how is art making an art experience spiritual adventure? I wish you hadn't asked because it's something I know to be true but have really would struggle to spell out. So now I have
to spell it out.
(15:59):
It takes us beyond ourselves, gives us moral imagination, gives us senses of things that don't have words.
The example I always go to is have you seen Blade Runner? You're a science fiction. So Rutger Hower has improvised last speech called Tears in Rain at the end of Blade Runner is about a human experience even though he is not technically human. But I couldn't tell you what the name of that experience is. It's
sort of nostalgia, sort of grief, sort of loss, sort of passion and compassion for life. But in that, I think it's 27 or 37 second speech, something beyond Words is conveyed about the fragility and awesomeness of existence. That's a spiritual adventure.
Julia Marie (16:45):
See, you got there
Alon Ferency (16:47):
Only by examples. I still can't define it, which just means I'm going to have to get back to you on that because it's a great question.
Julia Marie (16:53):
Okay, well, glad I could ask a great question. That's always amen. The sign of a good interview.
Alon Ferency (17:00):
There's a Yiddish saying that a good question is half an answer. Great question is very important.
Julia Marie (17:06):
Now you say you're an advocate for the artist soul within each of us. What do you mean by that?
Alon Ferency (17:14):
My earliest writing and most of my consistent writing is in theology, and my first mentor was a rabbi named Neil Gilman, and he and I are probably both fairly rationalist, but a place where we diverged is I believe in the soul. And he always thought it was poppycock. He might've said, I said, well, you need to
listen to more James Brown. And I think what James Brown's talking about, most of all the songs super bad, this thing that makes us want to shout this thing that tells us which way to go. I call that the soul, this sliver of distinct identity. Again, to go to the question, do we all have the same thing? Maybe some
things, but the soul is the part that is shareable and wholly unique to each person. And I think to the point of are there people who are not artists?
(18:03):
There are many people whose artistic soul is ground down, suppressed or put in a box or buried under the ocean in an oyster somewhere under the muck. And you need an excavator, you need a cheerleader, you need a volunteer. You need an advocate to reinvigorate and to bring to light that part of you. Is that part of
you the most sacred part of you? It's definitely one of them. And I think a good rabbi helps people solve their problems but is also an advocate for the soul period. I think a good sobriety sponsor is an advocate for the soul as well. I think a chaplain can do that. We're advocating for the part of the person that makes
them who they are. And as Rick Rubin talks, the best album is not the one that sounds like seven other albums that came out that year. It's the album that sounds most like Johnny Cash. When it's Johnny Cash and most slayer, when it's slayer in the studio, that's what you want in all art is the art that only you can
make, and I think that comes from the soul. So in that way, yes, advocating for the art that comes out of each distinct and unique soul.
(19:18):
Either it's the imposter syndrome or it's the flood of everyone else on Instagram, they think they're supposed to be making paintings or photographs that are their friend or are like this successful photographer when really they're supposed to make the art they were put on earth to make.
Julia Marie (19:32):
I use that very same point of view when I'm working with someone who wants to develop their intuition or any of those kind of skill sets, your unique expression of divinity so nobody can do it the way you do it.
Alon Ferency (19:51):
Unique expression of divinity. Yeah, that's what I would call the soul.
Julia Marie (19:54):
Yeah,
(19:55):
And the soul was expressing through the physical vehicle. So I just need to help them find the way they're going to put themselves out into the world. Now you mentioned Julia Cameron earlier. She's the author of The Artist's Way, and I agree with her that when she says that when we move towards our own creativity,
we move towards our creator, and so when we seek to become more spiritual, we find ourselves becoming more creative. And she writes that our creative and our spirituality are so closely interconnected that they are in effect one in the same thing. I know we talked a little bit about it, but what are your thoughts on how creativity and spirituality might be linked?
Alon Ferency (20:46):
Well, to back up a second, when I finally read the Artist's Way, I was very upset because I was like, this is the book I was supposed to write. And then I read Rick Rubins the Creative Act and I thought, oh, now there's two books I can't write. I mean everything in those books, not everything, but so much in those
books is my sense of how this all works, that it is a spiritual project, and then if we're attending to the spiritual project, the art flows out of that and then overwhelms everything else in our lives and can bring us so much joy. I think your question more precisely was how are creativity and spirituality linked? I
mean, are they the same thing?
Julia Marie (21:24):
Well, that's what
Alon Ferency (21:25):
I believe. I almost want to say they're almost the same thing. If you were to do a Venn diagram, are they the same circle or just a huge amount of overlap or adjacent or is there a third thing that encompasses all
of that? I don't know. I mean when I think about pictures of it, they're either the same thing or there's a third thing that is all of it, which we call God, which we call the soul. I don't know. I mean it's also like can you diagram a soul? There's no diagram of metaphysics, but they're too closely linked to really make
an argument about how they're linked, almost like protons and neutrons in a nucleus. It's all sort, the boundaries start to break down and you just have a coherent unit. So I don't know. It's another good question, but I don't have an answer because I think it's one of those, it's like a coon's something you can
meditate on, but not a paradox you can't resolve.
Julia Marie (22:25):
I feel like it's the human mind has a tendency to want to label and compartmentalize things that sometimes can't be separated from each other. Whenever we engage in a creative process, we're actually
activating or expressing our spirituality too or our spiritual nature.
Alon Ferency (22:46):
It's got to be the ancient idea of iio de that you are an imitation of the deity of God. God is if God is nothing else, and I'm not needing it to be a dogmatic or religious specific to God, but there must be a creator if you have any sense of divine, even if you're agnostic, that seems like a minimal assertion. And so if there is a creator, we ought to create. I think the other thing that it's not the same question, but I keep
coming back to the kes line that beauty is truth and truth, beauty, and then I always want to put a parentheses and an epilogue after that. And both of these are words for God. Truth and beauty are both words for God.
Julia Marie (23:28):
Yes.
Alon Ferency (23:28):
And I think as I'm starting a new writing project, I think the byline might be this is a theology of truth and beauty, that we experience something that is profoundly true, like the ending of Blade Runner or from when he was 23 can think of another one that is in the Gardner Museum in Boston. We are seeing God
and we think of beauty as this very superficial, oh, that's cute, but true beauty is something that is speaking to us of something beyond and within. And truth is in not fact. I try to help my children understand the difference between fact and truth, and I think scripture is true, but not many fact, I think
Casablanca is true but not factual. And I think truth is what really is a signpost to God. And in fact, a rabbinic saying that truth is the seal of God. Oh, I'm going to use that in my book.
Julia Marie (24:29):
I'm glad I could inspire you.
Alon Ferency (24:31):
Thank you.
Julia Marie (24:33):
I was told early on in my spiritual awakening process that the tuning fork of truth resides in my heart. So the tuning fork of truth resides in your heart, which means we all have a natural ability to respond in a certain way when we perceive something as being true. There's a resonance to it that impacts us at a very
deep level, and we may not even be able to explain how that happened, but
Alon Ferency (25:03):
Well, to go back to this motif of is everyone an artist? I would've agreed with what you just said, except there's a vast number of people currently who believe in conspiracy theories. So are we that clear on what
the truth is, or do we need help polishing that lens? Right. I'm not sure that humankind is perfectly attuned to truth. Maybe we need help tuning the tuning fork. I don't think you tune a tuning fork, but
Julia Marie (25:36):
I would say that the universe will rearrange itself to fit my picture of reality. So if at my human level I believe in conspiracy theories, then everything's going to be a conspiracy. But if I believe in truth and beauty, that's what the universe is going to give me.
Alon Ferency (25:58):
So then I think it's my work to help people see truth and beauty.
Julia Marie (26:01):
Yes,
Alon Ferency (26:01):
I mean, I think attention also matters in all of this. In a world of, and Patchett Patchett has an op-ed in the New York Times about how she regrets ever getting email, ever signing up for email, and I was like, oh, I can relate, sister. I'd love to have a flip phone and no email or email I only use to sign into things like
Amazon. All of this is mediating and creating layers between us and reality, and I think people are foolish to bemoan technology because at one point the novel was going to destroy society, and at many points, rock and roll or hip hop, we're going to destroy society, and in the end they tend to enrich. But I think we
have become sloppy curators of technology that you don't always need your cell phone, you don't need every good app. The cell phone has
Julia Marie (27:03):
Boundaries with our tech. That's all.
Alon Ferency (27:05):
Yeah,
Julia Marie (27:07):
That doesn't have anything to do with art and creativity, except then you'd have more time to be creative if you weren't constantly on your phone.
Alon Ferency (27:14):
Well, I think that's what Anne PR is saying. If you spend all this time writing emails, she's not writing a novel.
Julia Marie (27:20):
Exactly.
Alon Ferency (27:21):
All those words could have been in a novel. It's a one-to-one for her. Yeah,
Julia Marie (27:27):
That's a great point to make. In our world today, there's often not much room. Speaking of lack of time or time for us to explore our creative side, or for that matter for many of us to deepen our faith, what is the
appropriate role of art and faith in contemporary society? Where does it fit?
Alon Ferency (27:51):
I would put faith. Well, lemme break it down into multiple components, faith, and then there's belief. And people tend to use those words interchangeably. And I think they're very different experiences. And the theologian and philosopher Paul Tillek makes this clear in dynamics of faith. Faith is not a thing you can
prove or disprove. That's a belief. Faith is an experience of trust and a sensitivity to the universe. I wish more people had that and were less strident and binary and certain of their beliefs. I think those kind of certainty of belief can be toxic in public sphere. I think it's good to come into a public conversation with
belief. I believe X, I believe y about the economy, about the military, about human rights, but we can then have a conversation between those ideas and listen to each other, which we don't do very well anymore.
(28:53):
I think it's possible. I mean, I can't speak for other religious systems, but Judaism is so much about the question and so little about the resolution that someone once pointed out to me that the thing Jews do best is have a high tolerance for paradox. And so if we thought about faith as tolerance for paradox or
tolerance for uncertainty, I think we could be a lot more humble in our public conversations. I don't believe that religion should be absent from the public sphere. I think if Islam or Christianity or Buddhism
has informed your world, you should bring it into how you advocate for economic solutions to housing and homelessness. I think if it affects how you understand the origin of life, which is decided differently between Christianity and Judaism when life begins. So those are things that can enter into the public
sphere. I think it's dangerous to use religion as a cudgel to tell people, this is what I believe, so you can't challenge it. God said so. And then I think art the artist is a very odd paradox too, because art that's made with a message tends to be so heavy handed as to not be good art. But I wouldn't say that of Guernica
Guernica. It's clearly an anti-war piece of art, but it's extremely evocative and powerful.
(30:19):
And then there are some protest songs that are very wonderful, and I think the artist has a responsibility to speak into the public sphere to advocate for what I would call moral imagination in the public sphere. If you think about the capacity of a novel to put you in the shoes of someone whom you don't understand, it
ruined mysteries. A fine balance to poverty in India in the 1970s was something I couldn't envision. But by reading that book, you can get it. You can feel it. Standup comedians explaining black standup comedians connecting me to black culture or Latino culture, it's a very powerful experience. Food, restaurants, culture as a way to induce moral imagination and empathy is really important, but art as a
way to hammer people on the head sounds very Soviet. I'm not sure I want that. It's a fine balance. I'm not sure.
(31:18):
And I know that I wanted art and faith to have a role in society, but it's dangerous for anything to get the loudest voice and the most veto, and then it's corrosive to art and faith when they become too embedded in the political system. I mean, I don't think Soviet realism and futurism were good art, and I don't think message music tends to be great or Christian music. I mean the line from the show King of the Hill, you're not making Christianity better, you're making rock and roll worse. I tend to think that about religious music with the exception of let's say Bach. So it's a delicate balance, I would say. But I think they should be in the public sphere, which I know a lot of atheist liberals would say they shouldn't, but I
also think they shouldn't be determinative, which I think a lot of people on the right side of the political spectrum think they should.
(32:12):
So somewhere in the stoop, well, what if we accept the definition that faith is a sense of trust in the universe and acceptance of ambiguity and uncertainty in the universe of mystery. What if art is there among other things to teach us that kind of faith? Art is itself ambiguous. And so what if art teaches us
that there is beauty and ambiguity? What if art teaches us that you'll never what was on the mind of the poet? And there's only your reaction to TLS Elliot's words or Dickinson's words. What if art teaches us that we might never get the ending we want? My friend says that about Shakespeare's Othello. Every time
he sees that or reads it, he thinks maybe this will turn out different. This, which I think is the most wonderful reaction to a play like this is so well written. I keep thinking maybe it'll work out better. And I think the book of Deuteronomy does that well too. And Moses never gets what he wants. And what if the
role of the artist is to teach us that in a finite life? Not every question gets answered, and that's faith.
Julia Marie (33:17):
That's pretty profound. I would tend to land on that side of the equation. We're never going to get all the answers, even though our human mind, the limited part of ourself, really wants everything parsed and compartmentalized and arranged and neat consumable order when that's not really possible. But go ahead
and exercise your right to try and put the ineffable in a small box. That's okay.
Alon Ferency (33:50):
Yeah, that's what I would agree with. And a lot of, I learned this during my years in the music business. A lot of people want simple, easily consumable art, and there's a time and a place for that. I mean, I love a good dance song. A good pop dance song makes me very happy. But if all art were that easily digestible,
we'd have art, diabetes, I dunno what that would be, spiritual diabetes. Too much glucose
Julia Marie (34:18):
Goes through the system too quickly and causes an imbalance.
Alon Ferency (34:22):
Yeah,
Julia Marie (34:23):
Yeah, that's a pretty good analogy.
Alon Ferency (34:26):
Oh, we need more whole grain art.
Julia Marie (34:29):
Well, that's our time for today. In part two of my conversation, we'll be talking Dungeons and Dragons, how we can use our creative side to deepen our spiritual connection, the artist, as a revolutionary and the role of play in a creative life. I'm grateful to the Evolving Humans listeners for the continued support of
the podcast with your subscriptions and your shares. If you found value in this episode, please share it with two other people so that together we can bring more light to the world. Evolving Humans is now on YouTube. Please subscribe. And now here's a quote for you to ponder as you go about your day. To
practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it. Kurt Vonnegut