Rebuilding My Spirituality Through Art

I accidentally chronicled my spiritual journey through haiku comics

Before I decided the church I had been born into wasn’t true, I came to understand that it wasn’t good. I left my faith and community behind because I woke up to how cruel and controlling it was and how much damage it was doing to people I loved.

Fellow ex-Mormon David Archuleta’s song Hell Together best articulates these feelings. I felt that if God existed, and he was as capricious and cruel as my church was telling me, he was not a god worthy of my devotion.

This gave me the mental and emotional distance I needed to see for myself that the church I had given so much time and energy to was not only not the only true and living church on the face of the Earth, but it was a stranger to the truth.

While the REM song from my youth, Losing My Religion, would often pop into my head, I never felt like I had lost my religion. I understood that I had fully left it of my own free will.

However, I still yearned for the holy magic that I had often sensed in moments of quiet communion. I began to search for different manifestations of the divine. At the same time, in what I thought was an unrelated development, I also began creating haiku comics.

It was only after making and sharing these comics for a couple of years that I saw I was keeping a diary of my spiritual quest. I was beginning to uncover the roots of my spirituality.

I spent more and more time paying attention to the natural world. I found comfort and inspiration in the way the patterns of the seasons repeated with beautiful variation year after year.

I also noticed that one of my core beliefs was that it was a moral imperative to be as kind as possible to my fellow humans and the planet we all share.

Kindness and wonder would become the bedrock upon which I would build my spirituality.

Writing haiku started as a creative outlet. However, with each haiku I wrote and each comic that I made, my ability to pay attention to the world underneath my feet sharpened. Without intending to, my haiku habit evolved into a spiritual and mindfulness practice.

Instead of longing for a better future or castigating myself for the mistakes of my past, I spent more and more time in the present. The more time I spent in the present, the more wonders I saw unfolding around me.

Making haiku comics allowed me to let go of the shame I grew up with and release the anger I felt over being lied to. It was not an intentional way to deconstruct my religious life or to heal from religious trauma. It was just something I enjoyed, and that transformed me into the kind of person I enjoyed spending time with.

If I had intentionally set out to chronicle my journey away from my religion and towards a spirituality that doesn’t need an omnipotent, omniscient god, but that still believes in the mystical, I’m confident I would’ve quit after just a few days.

However, because I had developed a haiku habit concurrent with my spiritual wandering, I kept steadily creating art with the sole purpose of capturing what I had felt or observed in individual moments. This was a different kind of spiritual seeking than I had learned from my church leaders.

This type of seeking only looked like a spiritual pilgrimage in retrospect. It was only once I began to look back at what I had created that I saw I was making a kind of illustrated diary of my search for the divine.

Sometimes, I would capture a concise expression of my new outlook. Wonder was my religion. Leaving religion did not mean abandoning awe. Instead, it meant more fully embracing the abundance of wonder that surrounded me even in the most mundane moments.

The hardest part of leaving a high-demand religion was learning to trust myself. I still struggle with knowing how to listen to my intuition. But I also revel in the freedom of not needing to square my internal morality with whatever proclamation an octogenarian (or nonagenarian or even centenarian) prophet decides to make.

I’m still slowly learning that most of the answers I seek in life are inscribed on the walls of my heart.

Now, I have a full set of haiku comics to look back on to help me remember past insights and to inspire me to keep leaning into my curiosity.

Just like any diary, the haiku comics I would eventually gather into the collection Wild Divinity did not reveal a straightforward narrative. There were ups and downs, twists and turns.

I cannot look at the haiku comics and perfectly trace my thought processes. However, I can see signs of my obsessions, worries, and discoveries.

The most shocking thing to me is getting messages from people telling me that this book and my haiku comics have given them comfort and helped them on their own spiritual paths.

As I continue to grow and develop as a person, I find fresh insights into myself from the things past me observed. The more time that passes by, the easier it becomes for me to come to these comics as a reader instead of as the creator.

But I can always sense past me standing over my shoulder, looking into the panels with me, wondering what I’m seeing.

After I left my religion, I set out to find the divine. Part of me was hoping for a miraculous manifestation or some kind of life-altering epiphany. Instead, through daily observations and the creative discipline of writing haiku regularly, I slowly uncovered my true self.

In the end, the search for the divine ceased to have any allure for me. I realized that the holy magic I wanted was all around me. There was no need for a pilgrimage to find sacred messages. All I had to do was open my senses to the world I lived in.

Where I live already has all of the wonders I could ever want to experience. Mountains, forests, lakes, rivers, and oceans are all sacred spaces.

But so is my backyard, the parks I love to walk in, and even the downtown streets of my town.

The divine didn’t leave me when I left my religion. It was always everywhere. As long as I live under the wild night sky, the divine will always be accessible.

Wonder and awe are often described as spiritual sensations, and to me, that is what they are. However, the simpler way to understand wonder is to see it as the realization that there are bigger things than yourself in the universe. That doesn’t have to be god, or a mystical force. We can all stand in awe of nature herself.

The fact that trees create a simulacrum of death each fall in a spectrum of spectacular colors, only to “come back to life” every spring, is enough to remind you that you are small and nature is mighty.

I released Wild Divinity more than four years ago. I’ve moved on to many other projects, even releasing a second full collection of haiku comics. I still create haiku comics as a creative and spiritual practice.

I sometimes look at the art from Wild Divinity and feel self-conscious. Some of the poems feel awkward and wouldn’t pass my current editing process. But then I get over myself. I am working to see the haiku comics that make up Wild Divinity for what they are: true artifacts from a specific moment.

While I once ran away from everything I had learned in my former religion, I’m now more at peace with the parts of myself that still find comfort and understanding in the religious myths I spent a not inconsiderable part of my life learning and teaching.

I have always been curious. I’ve always pushed back against authority. Looking back, it feels inevitable that I would eventually leave the high-demand religion I was raised in.

I left that church so I could find a more moral sense of the divine. Rereading the haiku comics I made during that time, I see that I found the good I was seeking in nature and in my relationship to nature.

However, I also see that I’m still seeking.

Wonder is my religion. That means I must never stop looking for awe-inspiring moments and documenting my discoveries in haiku comics.

If you enjoyed this post, you will love my Sunday digest. You get a free ebook of 5 illustrated essays when you join.

You can buy a copy of Wild Divinity as an ebook or paperback from your favorite online bookshop, or directly from my Weirdo Poetry Shop.

My work is only possible becasue of readers like you! You can support my work by buying my books or microcrowdfunding. What is microcrowdfunding? That’s when you leave me a small tip becasue something I wrote or drew (maybe this post!) moved you in some way. Every $2 tip helps me pay the bills and keep making illustrated essays and poetry comics about what it means to be human.

Click here to leave a tip with PayPal

Click here to leave a tip with Venmo

Click here to leave a tip with Stripe

This post was originally posted on Medium.