I'm stepping into my dear old blog (a good year old now) and at the same time into a new era in my own life.
The Parable of the Talents rings more loudly than ever at this moment: Matthew 25:14 tells Jesus' story about the servants who doubled their talents by investing them; and the servant whose FEAR of his Lord caused him to bury what he was given. His reward? He is "cast out" an "unprofitable servant".
It's as terrible a story as it is true. How does it relate, however, to me, and, who knows, possibly you?
Well, I don't know about you, but - can you believe it - I took a vow of poverty during my childhood: brainwashed by the books I read, I decided that having money condemned one, that it was impossible to be involved with money without being greedy. All the materially poor characters that populated the pages of my literature were pure at heart: like them I wanted to be! I was, quite literally, terrified of the effects of having money. I guess there is some sense in that, if you look around.
Still, what subtleties I missed! How foolish it is to confuse material poverty with poverty of spirit. The material poverty of the literary characters I admired was a FOIL for their richness of spirit, their sincerity and resourcefulness, their loving hearts.
Material poverty, I hope you'll agree, is one of humanity's inevitable burdens to bear; a burden that it behoves the materially wealthy to help carry; a burden it behoves all of us, rich and poor alike, to lighten communally by doing what we can to ensure that each of us has the few things that are needed to live a dignified and fulfilled life.
(By the way - on the topic of a dignified and fulfilled life: have you heard of Epicurus? I discovered his blissfully simple recipe on happiness in Alain de Boton's superb book,
The Consolations of Philosophy - a must-read for anyone interested in life. Alas, that does not make all of us.)
Anyway. Back to poverty. It's
spiritual poverty that's the REAL problem for humanity: poverty of spirit is, quite simply, an offence to the gift of life.
But what is spiritual poverty? Well, if you go back to the Parable - I'd update it into modern lingo and say that it teaches that to live in fear of being who you are, and to refuse to do what you know you COULD do; to refuse to MAKE SOMETHING out of what you have - however little that may be - it is THAT, which causes the "weeping and gnashing of teeth" the parable ends with - a beautifully grim description of the self-immolation that follows in the wake of bitter self-truths.
So. I'm done with fear. I'm abandoning the half-life I've lived, always kind of ashamed of what I know are my talents. The past one and a half years of pain and trauma have stumbled me into sharing my poems as never before, and finding them enjoyed by others to an unprecedented degree - so that now, for the first time in my life (old enough though I am to be a grandmother) I'm focusing without flinching on what I have to give, instead of FEARING that it's not going to GET me what I need to survive materially.
I've decided to invest in my poetry to the degree that I'm collaborating with an online marketing agency to help prepare towards the launch of
Greater Matter in early October this year. I am breathing fresh air with the risk I'm taking. It feels good and it feels true. Yes, I could lose, yes I could fail, of course. I'm in any case such an old hand at failure that it's no longer scary at all. But let fears NOT triumph over hopes, and certainly let them NOT stop me from trying my level best to reach towards the self I want and need to be: a self that wishes to give her late husband the biggest, most beautiful gift she possibly can: a book of poems celebrating her own emotional survival as widow; poems witnessing the good he gave me by the power of his love.
