Original Music, Spirituality, Jesus stuff, Weird Stuff!

Greetings, Steemians:

My name is Zelig Bearson. I am a man of many aliases and talents, many of which I will unveil to you shortly. For now, my main aim is to get comfortable with this new network and try things I've never tried before as a content maker!

Things you can expect to find here:

ORIGINAL MUSIC. CHRISTIAN STUFF. INTERFAITH STUFF. ESOTERIC STUFF. THEOLOGICAL MUSINGS. POETRY. COMEDIC SHORTS. VIDEO ART.

Things I am hoping to find here:

COLLABORATION. CONVERSATION. COMMUNITY. INNOVATION. VALUE.

About Me:

So I'm a hybrid: I'm a creative AND a spiritual. A fully-functioning eccentric artist with a duel calling to Judeo-Christian ministry. It's weird and confusing. My heroes are Dorothy Day and George Carlin; St. Francis and Frank Zappa; Jesus Christ AND the Beatles. They were both about the same size, to me.

I've been juggling this duel calling for some time, and you'll see it's a theme in my work.

Oh yea, and I'm a millennial. Hoo boy. It's a recipe for a strange life with unique challenges, but exceptional payoffs!

My spiritual journey began while I was a music student at New England Conservatory in Boston, MA, circa 2006-2010. During my time in Boston, I was surrounded by the musicians who have since gone on to have very successful projects -- Lake Street Dive, Guerrilla Toss, Tredici Bacci, Maragret Glaspy, Wilder Maker, Katie Von Schleicher, and many more. While everyone head their heads in the music, my attention was split -- somewhere along the line, I started discerning a call to spiritual ministry of some sort. This was all the more confusing because I was not brought up with religion, so I had no idea what I was experiencing.

By the end of my time in Boston, I'd had enough foreordained encounters with wandering Franciscan monks and free-thinking mystics to perceive that my particular call was to be a minister of Christ. But it wasn't gonna be that simple. I had the wonderful opportunity of being minister of music at an upstart Acts 29 church in Springfield, MA -- but I ended up leaving very suddenly, and under quite controversial circumstances. At some point, I will share that very difficult story with you in more detail...

In my heart of hearts, I knew that music was a calling just as strong as my call to ministry. A very close friend and mentor of mine, who shared a double-vocation to painting and the priesthood in the Greek Orthodox Church, encouraged me to follow my artistic muse, which I had been suppressing and calling "inferior" to the call to ministry. Counseling me in crisis over Chinese food (God bless him), he asked me, "Where would you go, if you were free to go anywhere?"

And I answered, "New York City." Within the week I had moved to Brooklyn, NY.

The past five years, I have devoted most of my energy to my original music project, Workman Song. Most of the internet coverage of Workman Song will not withhold that my real name is Sean McMahon, and I started the Workman Song project in 2013 while I lived in Brooklyn. At the time, I was also touring North America and Europe with bands like Streets Of Laredo, Wilder Maker, and Bird Courage. I cut my teeth on the indie music industry during my time in New York City.

Here's a pretty good artistic example of the kind of stuff I did with that project:

In 2016, I decided to take what I'd learned in the city and move back to Northampton, MA, my home region; and home to Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth, Sebadoah, Lou Barlow; and more recently, And The Kids, Suitcase Junket, and more. At the same time, my younger brother & chief collaborator Griffin, a brilliant organist and musician in his own right (that's him playing in the video above!), transferred from his job at Christ Church NYC to a small little Episcopal Church on Martha's Vineyard. It wasn't long before I found myself on the Vineyard more often than I was on the mainland!

All of this traveling has led me to focus more and more on internet content creation. I have so many home bases, and at the same time, I have none! I am constantly traveling, constantly exploring, constantly working on new projects -- and the more I travel, the more I explore, the more I work, the more stories I have to tell. So now, I have decisively made it a point to start telling my stories.

So that’s pretty much me. But there's lots of weird nooks and crannies in my world that you'll get to know.

Like, for example, I also play in a “meta-groover thrash” aka circus metal band aka “pseudo-educational art comedy” group called Tidwell’s Treasure that makes videos like this (if the vid doesn’t show, follow the link! -- psst, anyone know how to embed Instagram vids in Steemit?): https://www.instagram.com/p/BR9b1Ayjvom/

Was that confusing?

Maybe. I look forward to sharing my weird world with y’all. I'm sure I'll be learning a lot in the next few weeks, but I'm just diving in now. A big shout to @heymattsokol for being my first point of contact on here, shooting some resources my way. This community seems very cool so far.

Peace, and may the force be with you.