some thoughts about art

I write, but I don't really consider myself an artist. I feel like I consider myself an explorer of the mind, of being. I'm not exactly sure what it means to "make art." I hear other writers, musicians, painters, etc, discussing "making art," but I never feel like I'm making art. When I play guitar and make up a new song, I don't think about making art. It feels the same as hiking a mountain to me or swimming in the ocean or even digging a hole, doing yard work - I don't see a big difference between the two acts. I sit in zazen each morning, which could look like its own specific place for zazen, but then I notice that there's nothing that isn't zazen. I feel the same about "art." I don't even, when I write, feel as though I'm "making" anything. There's some sense of creativity, a creative energy at work, I think, but I really often don't know what art is. I'm probably being dense, but I'm more likely just sort of dumb. I love books, movies, music - and I often really dislike "entertainment," like comic book movies - but I rarely think about "art." Instead I think about perception, being, thoughts and emotions and how the two influence each, physical body, the importance of being physical or active, stillness, rest. I'm much more interested in writing and films that ask questions, and that ask questions about everyday life. Most "realistic" fiction doesn't do this in a way I'm interested in (relying primarily on basic representation just for the sake of it), and fiction that is more speculative or imaginative often seems as though its purpose is escape of some kind, but I'm not interested in escape. I'm interested in not escaping, I'm interested in "art" that doesn't escape, that doesn't want to escape. How to not escape. Many books, literary books, seem to me to be about the fact that we can't escape our situations, our limited consciousness, our bodies and the characters try to escape, or the art itself tries to escape, but I'm interested in making writing in which a character recognizes their desire for escape is a faulty premise: escape into the void, into another dimension, into art or something else, into religion, seems to me to be a faulty premise. In other words, it's misunderstanding perception and consciousness from the start. There's nowhere to escape to, nothing to escape from - that's the big delusion. A lot of literature, like psychology, starts from the idea that we're all separate, we can't know one another, except fleetingly, through language or something like art or writing. Connection is tenuous, dangerous, risky. But what if our perception of ourselves is incorrect - what if we are not separate? Or what if we are separate and not at the same time? What if our thoughts and consciousness are not what they appear to be? What if every book that is written is not one separate book, one book among a sea of books, but just a part of one big book? What if all consciousness is actually one consciousness, which we just perceive as being separate and distinct? What if not escaping and staying here, but deeply, could reveal this?