I was raised well and had all the necessities: love, good food and water, someone to teach me, and friends. I am incredibly lucky just to have those things in the first place. I can’t think of a time I didn’t have enough of everything I needed.
These things are all wonderful. But having them all puts you in great danger of taking these things for granted and not appreciating that not everyone has them, which leads to overvaluing them. Thanks to my teaching I believe I have avoided most of that.
Despite all the things I have, I like anything else in the world am faced with difficulties. I became so concerned with right and wrong that I sacrificed taking good care of myself at times, in order to do what I thought was just in a given situation. I had a great fear of sin (a religious word for making a mistake. In religion, connected to the “black” side of the religious black and white thinking) I overcorrected to care only about others, and to have little love for myself, hoping to be perfect when in fact that was impossible. It has taken me a long time but I feel I have learned to a large extent to accept my sinfulness and still love myself regardless.
My path led me down an unfortunately dark road wherein I gave up to a large extent my spirituality, whittling it down from an overwhelming piety to a hidden sense of faith. I need to return to that faith, and with every minute I find myself nearing the point where I can find it again, and build on it... it is something that is missing in my life to a large extent. The fact is, I want to have the amount of faith in God that I had before, because it gave me strength. But I know that this is not to be found again easily. They say that anything easily gained is probably not that much worth having, and I believe this. A faith easily gained is a faith easily lost. And just like a car, your faith will lose its usefulness if not maintained.
I feel strongly that I have insight. And that it is close to useless if not shared, if not spread. My whole life I am looking for how to spread this insight. Like a peach left too long on the vine, I feel it rotting inside of me. But it is not on the branch anymore, I am old enough and it has been picked, but am afraid to lose it, I am afraid to give it for fear of losing control of it. I hide it inside me as if inside a refrigerator (hoping it won’t spoil) and I seldom look at it, remembering only how it looked when I first held it. Weakly, I pray that my abuse of holding this gem will harm few, reassuring myself that others must carry it as well, and will spread it regardless. I sometimes wallow in self-pity at my inaction. But sometimes I spur myself to action, and what spurs me to action is my faith. In a lot of ways I think it is a miracle that I even have insight, and a miracle that I still see it. But it will be a sin to have it die inside without having been shared.
The worst thing of all is that nobody sees it but me. Just as it ripened, I saw it on the vine, taking shape, sublime in its beauty, fertilized by the bounty that surrounded me in my life, fueled by the sun’s rays, which in this metaphor are God’s love. And I reached out to it and it overwhelmed me, and I was afraid. But, there was nothing for anyone else to see! I hid it inside me because I was afraid of it. Eventually my sin tore it from my grasp, fear taking me over. Without it, I no longer obsessed over it, and I learned to do as the outside world indicated, and I reconstructed myself with the professional and gracious help of those who love me, and everyone around me. And I forgave myself for not sharing it, because my life was out of my control.
Now I have taken my life and put it back together. Now I am whole again, and my life will go on.
My writing is pretentious and I doubt that it will speak to anyone clearly without more work. I seldom write anything except when I am moved to do so, but (check out this metaphor) the battle will not be won if you wait for the enemy to come before beginning to sharpen the blade.
Battle metaphors are old, and I don’t really like them that much because the rely on a knowledge of war to have their meaning. However, this applies to any metaphor really, if you aren’t familiar with the context, the metaphor is useless.
This is why the truly useful creations connect to things that exist for longer amounts of time. Shakespeare wrote in sounds that communicate pretty much exactly the way they did four hundred years ago, because we speak pretty much the same language now. That kind of expression, the spoken word, is very visceral, so it moves the audience very well. This is not to say that a foreign-language production of Macbeth will have no meaning, because there is more to a play than the sounds of the words that are spoken (that makes sense in my head, I swear!) A story, that is, a series of events that occur, is a universal language, because all human beings’ experience is made up of events that occur one after another.
In a lot of ways I wish that art was more like science, that it was easier to measure. When I think of art and feelings, what I write often comes out like sweeping generalizations.
