There’s a line in the movie Midnight in Paris… Gil, standing in the rain with his notebook, gets called a child by his fiancée and by everyone who knows him well. I know those words. My lovers have ascribed them to me too… a little boy, Peter Pan, the man who never got out of the sandbox, a puer not a senex. I always answer, “I know, I know, you see… I am an artist.”

I Am Childish. I still believe in true love, tree forts, and treasure maps. I still visit Neverland, the Shire, and Wonderland. I did not get the astonishment of life spanked, churched, educated, or combed out of me. The child in me is not a weakness… he’s the apple of my eye.

I Believe in Imagination Over Reason. People with imagination tend to upset those without one. A very successful CEO friend once told me that I think with my heart and not my brain. My former wife told me I think with my penis. Imagination is indeed like a muscle. I found out that the more I use it, the bigger it gets.

I Live Close To Nature. I have gone back to the Garden of Eden, and I am staying. No angel with a flaming sword is getting me out this time. I refuse the fig leaf. My body knows the sun, the dirt, the river (and the taste of the apple) better than my mind ever will, and I trust Mother Nature over the Heavenly Father every time.

I Believe In Wonder and Awe. This is my concept of the divine… the happy sadness of a sunset or enveloped in wet swirling clouds on sky edge. Wonder is my defense against the horrors of what people do to each other. I refuse to let the people who are ashamed and sad of what they have allowed to wither within make me a cynic.

I Am A Miracle. I walked out of a cultish religion, a prudish culture, and an education system that builds clones, and I came out the other side an original instead of a reproduction. The old fear of an angry, omnipotent unknown is gone from me. Old things passed away. Behold, all things became new… and somehow, against all odds, I escaped.

I Believe in the Visible. Give me the finite human body over the eternal human soul. Give me Botticelli’s Venus rising out of the shell, give me Helmut Newton’s women who own every room they walk into, give me Vargas and Serpieri and the whole tradition of artists who understood that flesh is where beauty actually lives. Humanism isn’t a compromise position for me. If there is an invisible world out there, we are living in it.

I Reject the Terrifying Irrational. Ghosts, gods, hell… I refute them all. They were built to keep children afraid of the dark and adults afraid of their own bodies. I traded the terrifying irrational for the world in front of me, and the trade has been the best decision of my life.

I Believe in the Poet over the Priest. Odysseus had to choose, at the end, which men in his hall deserved the sword. If I’m ever standing where he stood, I know which one I’m killing first. The priest sells certainty about a world he’s never seen. The poet colors a world you can touch.

I Am Not Afraid of the Dead. Cemeteries don’t frighten me… they intrigue me. Bodies deserve honor, but we erase them, and we are a culture that hides its dead and never returns to them. I walk through graveyards the way other people walk through gardens.

I Believe in a World Full of Beauty and Not a World Full of Fear. Fear is the emotion every priest and tyrant reaches for first. Interest and enjoyment in a world of beauty are the emotions that drive me. I choose which world I live in every single morning, and I keep choosing beauty.

I Believe in Grief and Sadness and Broken Hearts. These are not failures of the beautiful life… they’re proof I’m living one. A heart that never breaks was never fully open. I’ll take the ache over the numbness every time.

I Believe Monsters Exist Only to Give the Hero His Chance at Glory. Every dragon is there so someone can become who they were meant to become. I’ve stopped resenting my own monsters. They teach me my true name.

I Reject Religion. Not the spiritual… I reject religion. The institution, the hierarchy, the sanctuaries built to manage awe instead of experiencing it. I kept the wonder, and I refuse to drink the poison. Throughout history, religion has poisoned everything.

I Believe in Justice. Without it I would despair completely, and I refuse to accept despair as a permanent condition. Justice is the thing that keeps beauty from dissolving into chaos. “True peace is not merely the absence of tension: it is the presence of justice.” (MLK, Jr.)

I Reject the Sentimental and the Melodramatic. I respect the pre-conversion art of Thomas Kinkade, but I abhor his mass-marketed moral reflections. Life is not a movie; I am not Voldemort, and you are not Harry Potter.

I Believe the Universe Created Humanity and the gods. Small g. Myths: Roman, Greek, and Norse. I posit the earliest universe did not have a conventional “starting moment or creative force” the way people usually imagine or believe it. We are a product of the universe’s unfolding processes

I Believe This Is Not All I Am, But It Is Who I Am. A belief system isn’t a cage. There’s more of me than any list can hold. But the heart of the matter, that stays beating when everything else gets stripped away, is this: I am no longer seeking goodness or perfection; I am seeking wholeness.

My Hero, My Archetype Is Dionysus. You can have Apollo with his order and his measured lines, and Jesus Christ with his rules and regulations… I’ll take the god of wine and ecstasy and the wild side of things, the god who tears down the fence around what’s respectable and dances nude on the wreckage.

I Am Legion. Multi-layered, complicated, contradictory in the ways every enlightened person is protean. I contain playfulness, sensuality, sensitivity, curiosity, creativity, intimacy, resilience, serenity, equanimity, transcendence, compassion, love, and more, and I’ve stopped trying to deny and repress them.

Above All, I Believe in Sensuality, Curiosity, Communion and Freedom. Everything else on this list is secondary aspects of my self. These four are the essentials—my essence. I have sacrificed myself on the altar of self-denial long enough. I have discovered a way to enjoy life. 

I am an artist.