Woes & Throes

Sorry I have been relatively mute for the past week or so. Class, grad school, & life - in whatever configuration you may want to order them... they have been affecting me. But, so is my ever ongoing issues surrounding my path, spiritual, occupational and otherwise. * Side note (way off topic): for those of you who were following me through my juice feast, yeah... the juicer I ordered back then, arrived. Today. Anyway. I have always been caught between art and writing. I am an academic, but I always wanted to be an artist. I was on the track too. I had private art lessons since I was seven up until the age of, (we'll be generous and say) 16, where at that point I was living in JH and the only art classes available were of the public school sphere. So, I did that. It wasn't until my freshman year at UA-Tucson that I realized, of all my classes I was taking, my studio classes bit the worst. And I fully blame this on their curriculum req’s i.e. "everyone starts at the bottom" even if one had a color theory portfolio going back to when they were nine... all the same: the experience kind of killed it for me. So -- I threw myself into the topics that were interesting to me: all those things that would eventually garner me a BA in humanities once I transferred to CU. That is, art history, literature, philosophy, religion, anthropology. I am currently pursuing my MA in Literature in Colorado as well. But here's the sad thing. I have let myself be corrupted by Literature with a capital L. I used to be mythology nerd, sci-fi, fantasy and faerie tales: stories of the mythic mind, magical realism, folklore and the hidden allegories they are the vessels for. My Masters, until now, had ruined my love of reading... but I am considering that maybe I am not reading the right things. I am insanely interested, fascinated, hooked on the comparative study of religion and their mythic counterparts: as they are all the same story, essentially. All religions conspire to allow humankind to arrive at the same place, almost always via the same ends, bearing the same path-markers. It does not matter if you are Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Sufi, Hindu, Jainist, Pagan, Egyptologist, Buddhist: everything leads to absolutely the same outcome. But our understanding of this as a culture is supremely thwarted and compressed/oppressed. We have lost our ability to relate to God on mystical levels, and have limited ourselves to the literal ones... how unfortunate...

Anyhow --- I can’t decide now: Do I go back to art? Becoming classically trained? Raise my kids in an atmosphere where I give art classes to local families, and write stories until I fall asleep by candle light like Jo March in Little Women? Do I pursue a PhD in Theology & Culture? And MFA? What am I supposed to do with all of my interests without relegating myself to being in school forever?