So, I was feeling a bit off lately, you know? Like something was just… missing. Everything felt a bit too polished, too surface-level. I spend a lot of time online, like everyone, and it all started to blur together. Same old stuff, different day.
My Accidental Tumble Down a Rabbit Hole
Anyway, one evening, I was just clicking around, not really looking for anything specific. Just trying to find something, anything, that didn't feel like more of the same. And I stumbled across these images of really, really old art. I'm talking cave paintings, strange carvings, stuff that's thousands of years old. At first, I was like, "Okay, old drawings, cool." But then I kept looking.
There was something about them. They weren't just pictures. They felt… alive. Almost like they were trying to tell me something, but in a language I didn't quite understand. It wasn't about skill, not like how we judge art today. It was something deeper, more raw. It kinda got under my skin.
Connecting the Dots: Art as More Than Decoration
So, being the curious type, I started digging a bit. What was the deal with this ancient art? Why did they make it? And that's when I bumped into this whole idea of shamanism. Now, I'm no expert, okay? I just read a few things here and there. But what I gathered was that for these ancient folks, art wasn't just something to hang on the wall or make your cave look nice.
It seemed like their art was a tool. A massive, important tool. The shamans, the spiritual leaders or healers or whatever they were, they were often the artists. Or at least, they guided the art. They used it for all sorts of things:
- To connect with spirits, or what they believed were spirits.
- For healing rituals.
- To tell stories and pass down knowledge.
- To try and understand the world, the animals, the hunt, life and death.
It was like their art was a bridge. A way to reach into these other worlds or states of mind. It wasn't art about something; it was the something. It was active, it was doing a job.
What It Made Me Think
This whole discovery really made me stop and think. We have so much art today, everywhere. Galleries, museums, online. But how much of it really does anything? I mean, beyond looking good or matching the sofa. It felt like we’d kind of… separated art from its power source, if that makes sense. Made it into a commodity, a decoration, rather than a vital, living thing.
I started looking at even simple things differently. A kid's drawing, a piece of graffiti. Wondering what the impulse was behind it. Was there some tiny echo of that ancient need to create, to connect, to make sense of things through making marks?
I'm not saying we all need to become shamans or start painting bison on our apartment walls. But it was a pretty wild realization for me. Just thinking about how art, at its roots, was so deeply tangled up with the spiritual, with healing, with the very fabric of life. It wasn’t on the sidelines; it was right in the thick of it. Makes you wonder what we've lost, or maybe just forgotten how to tap into.
Anyway, that’s my little journey into art and shamanism. Just a thought that popped into my head after falling down that internet rabbit hole. Kinda makes you look at a paintbrush or a lump of clay a bit differently, doesn't it?
