Idolatry

I enjoy it when opportunities to chuckle at myself dawn on me (all too slowly sometimes). . . like my teenage propensity to idolize writers, artists, and musicians. (And, of course, that teenager still lives in me somewhere; I still converse with her.) Though I recognized and felt the connection between "myself" and what those famous or simply admired folk were doing up on their pedestals, they were remote, but more than that (because I sometimes reached out to them through letters), it was my perception of my own abilities (in contrast to how I perceived their abilities, way up there) that often held me back from finding my own voice. In comparing myself, rather than acknowledging my uniqueness (that also bore similarities to them but----in my mind----usually fell short in the comparison), I focused on deficiencies rather than my birthright (as ALL have this right) to discover and express myself in an ever-changing way. "Changing" is key, because art appears to be stable, to represent some sort of constant THING----yet any artist/writer knows that once the words and the canvas are set aside, it's as if someone else created them because that person no longer exists. Who's left to praise or ridicule? She's gone!

Those arguments played endlessly, back and forth in my mind as I walked (and sometimes still walk) the fence line between revealing and hiding.

In part, it's because ideas and words and ART can sometimes seem too "precious," and when this happens, as in Gollum's experience, they become all-consuming----consumption. What am I getting at here? I'm trying to understand how I can burn up on one day with a huge passion for language and art and then the next feel myself resisting the propensity to make it too precious. . .

After all----it's only words . . .  (AND THE WORD BECAME FLESH) . . . and flesh. Oh, yes.