Resurrecting the Dead
Art is the Gift Worth Keeping in a Pixellated World
We are ghosts.
It’s funny to think about, isn’t it? Here in 2025, we are surrounded by screens. Computers, cell phones, TVs, fitness trackers, tablets… the list goes on and on. A few months ago they even installed giant plasma television screens in my local Walmart as part of some large renovation project. Now whenever I walk down the aisle from house wares to pet food, I am confronted with the latest ads for the clothing section and what’s currently ‘trendy.’
Call me a luddite, but I hate it.
I hate it, even as I am sucked in.
Technology has become ubiquitous to our society, touting improvements, ease, and increased productivity for our lives. AI – artificial intelligence – is the latest in a long stream of developments promising untold wonders at the touch of a button, and my mind spins when considering how different a childhood my children and students are experiencing compared to mine. Growing up in rural Idaho, I remember having a rotary wall phone in the house. It was a big deal when we got a phone with touch buttons. I remember being 7 years old and playing Oregon Trail on one of the original Macintosh DOS computers with the black and green screen. And at 12 I remember the tortured scream of computer chips as they coaxed the modem to connect to something called “The Internet.” It was all so novel and mysterious.
But I also remember countless days spent laying out in the horse field amongst the tall grass, watching giant cumulonimbus clouds scud across the sky. I remember poking at the rusted, half-buried cast iron stove ruins in the locust trees where the original homestead had been. I remember hearing my own breath move in and out of my lungs and feeling the earth under my feet. I remember long, quiet hours immersed in a drawing while curled up on Grandma’s couch, smelling the pungent oil paints and turpentine of the latest project on her easel.
To me, the excitement of being able to type out a message on a computer screen and send it immediately in real-time to family residing four states away paled in comparison to the days when they piled out of the van in our driveway after traveling most of the week to arrive.
I worry that today’s kids don’t have that.
The speed of pixels has gone from a convenience, to being omnipresent, and I worry we are losing ourselves along the way. Pundits and researchers far more skilled than I, have well-established the concerns, causes, effects, and warnings of a life fully immersed in technology. I believe they’re right, and I won’t bore you by regurgitating the details.
Put plainly: we are becoming ghosts. We are increasingly a world of disembodied spirits, and what’s worse is that many are choosing to sacrifice their hard-knock humanity for promised ease.
When I was in my pre-Christian era (™), I was quite fond of paranormal literature and movies. During said era, one of the tropes that made the rounds was that of the person who gets turned into a ghost, and the main plot of the tale is how to reverse the curse and get them to turn back.
In our world of disembodied spirits, I’m concerned with how we turn back.
Let’s take a minute to examine semantics.
To be disembodied is defined as “separated from or existing without the body,” or “to separate or free (something) from its concrete form.”
Sounds rather like a lot of arguments about ‘transcendence,’ doesn’t it? It’s an ancient argument with a modern spin. The gnostic heretics believed the fleshly body was evil and the only thing good was the spirit – e.g. you must be delivered from your fleshy body and leave it behind to achieve transcendence. Tech is no different. Who needs friends in real life when you can have them on Facebook? Can’t find a date at the local coffeeshop? Sign up for the latest algorithm-ran matchmaking service, and you’ll find love without leaving your house. Need something to read? Innumerable electronic books, library loan services, and fanfiction sites vie for your attention, at the touch of a button. Groceries? Now you can buy them online and never have to speak to the cashier. Somewhere along the way, the Internet ceased to be a tool like ye olde rotary phone, and promised influence, fame, riches, and fulfillment in life for all of us ghosts.
It reminds me of that Bruce Willis film, “Surrogates” (2009), where real life and physical activity became viewed as “risky” and people increasingly chose to live vicariously through specialized robotic avatars… and I have the eerie feeling like I’m watching it happen in front of my eyes.
So what is the opposite of disembodied? It is to become embodied.
The definition of embodied is: “to be an expression of or give a tangible or visible form to (an idea, quality, or feeling); to include or contain (something) as a constituent part.” To put it simply, to be embodied involves tangible expression, and the act of being part of a whole.
Being embodied is not just being a mind or a consciousness floating through pixels, but to feel. Touch. Be.
It strikes me that this ever-present technological creep which sucks our lives into bits and bytes is ultimately an assault on our humanity. God did not create us as a brain or thought floating in space – He could have created us as Transformers-esque sentient creatures (you can’t convince me it would be beyond His capacity and talent), but instead He chose to create us as soft, organic beings capable of feeling the earth under our feet, breathing fresh air, and seeing the sky as it changes from orange to red to purple and pink.
He created us to take it all in, deeply.
And it’s heart-breaking to see people willingly choose to forfeit the gift primarily for one reason: avoidance of pain and discomfort.
My testimony is one filled with trauma but marked by resilience. To be blunt, I was in a cage fight in some way or another with the devil until I became Catholic this year at 40 years old. Jesus, in His infinite graciousness, was patient, kind, and steadfast when I first encountered Him way back in 2019. His presence and faithfulness, the likes of which I hadn’t experienced before, earned my undying loyalty and drew me closer to Him step by step.
When all I wanted to do was escape from rejection, abuse, violence, and hardship, He showed me how to stand. When all I wanted to do was be numb, He showed me how to feel again.
One of these ways was through the restoration of my creativity.
Creativity is a hot-button item in the Kingdom of God. It’s a gift God placed in each of us – He is a creative God, and as we are made in His image, we are, therefore, creative as well. Additionally, the first person recorded as having been filled with the Holy Spirit was Bezalel in the book of Exodus, and it was so that he could create artworks for the temple. The arts are Important to God.
And they should be to us, too, because I believe that the arts are the way back home from the computerized matrix.
To make art, any kind of art, puts us back in touch with the deep parts of our being and grounds us as fully embodied creatures. We feel the tools of our trade, smell the smells of our studio, hear the rasp of our medium on the canvas or page…. We slow down and truly absorb the bodily experience. You have to practice holding the pencil or paintbrush properly, you have to do various exercises and studies where you practice learning to shade and blend and mix colors.
Our expression is tangible and roots us with connection to our world, both within and without. In this manner, creativity builds bridges that bring our broken and hurting fragments back together, and places them in context. Art helps us look at the world differently. Art helps us understand our depths. You spend countless days retraining your eyes to see differently. Where once you would walk past a tree-lined avenue and hold an absent-minded awareness of the trees and the grass and the concrete curb, you have to train yourself to see the exact shade of the leaves when the light passes through them. You have to cultivate an awareness of the texture of the bark, and a physical understanding of how it differs from, say, the texture of the grass – one of the best ways to do this is by touching and smelling during outdoor reconnaissance. All the “boring” practice exercises your high school art teacher gives you are designed for one thing: teaching you how to see as an artist.
For a world of people who choose to become disembodied (or dissociated, to borrow a psychological term) because life as they know it hurts, art-making can gently encourage reentry because it is uniquely suited toward helping us transition back from being ghosts. When everything in our world is trying to suck our consciousness into a series of pixels, the slow process of traditional art and learning how to sustain artistic observation grounds us deeply into our senses and encourages us to remain in touch with our bodies. We become fully present, attentive, and engaged in the moment. This engagement, embodiment, is the balm to disembodiment or “dissociation,” helping us resist becoming ghosts in the machine of this increasingly tech-driven world.
Additionally, making art gives us the tools to reframe the parts of our lives that we’d rather avoid. Suddenly, Facebook doom-scrolling seems less appealing than going for a walk, and the local coffeeshop becomes an opportunity to find beauty in mundane places instead of the scene of loneliness. Traumatic memories, moments of embarrassment, and periods of grief become jumping off points for expression, wisdom, and understanding in prose, song, and paint, and furthermore, potentially capable of turning into masterful works that could change entire social trajectories.
Making art taps us directly into the heart of what it means to be human, and amid endless notifications, software updates, or the shine of plasma screens, I’d encourage you to remember that’s a gift worth keeping. ❦
**If you enjoyed this creative ramble, please consider supporting my work with a free or paid subscription, a simple restack/share, or by leaving a tip. 🌿
Hoorah! Beautifully said, Heather!