Looking for the divine

This is my most basic confession: I've never been the religious type. After being raised in a totally non-religious household, I've never been much for joining any kind of movement, as admirable as many of their practices and goals may be. 

There's just too many rules made up by people who lived and died centuries and centuries ago, too many inevitably human contradictions, too many fuckheads using smug religious ideals to spread unnecessary fear and hate.

But this doesn't mean I'm not looking for the divine where I can find it. It doesn't mean I don't crave some spirituality in my life.

And sometimes I do find it - as cheesy as it is, I do hear it in my little girl's laugh, and see it in the smile of a total stranger. I do find it everywhere in beauty of this this glorious, magnificent world we live on, and I do sometimes catch glimpses of it when I have visited some of the actual holiest places on the planet.

And maybe I'm just the shallowest motherfucker on the planet, but I also sometimes I find it in the movies, and in cartoons, and good tunes. That connection that stories can bring to you, making you aware that you're not the only person to think and react that way, and that there are people out there who believe the same fundamental truths that you do. 

And sometimes stories can just be so intensely moving that they start touching deeper parts of the soul, and telling you that there is more than this base material existence. Something more.

I don't know the meaning of life, but the search is the thing. While I might not ever find it, sometimes I see glimpses of it in comic books.