So… if you want to read this “cold” and see how it hits you/try to figure it out, just read the poem below and don’t read the paragraphs below it. 🙂
So…
I wrote this poem when I was thinking about pride and shame and self-love and self-hate and my life. Specifically, I think what we usually call pride is often technically more related to something more like hubris, i.e. arrogance or too high a view of oneself. But I wonder (and have for some time) if that’s just the head side of the pride coin … with shame being the tails side. I think we tend to see pride as the big daddy of sins, the one that took the devil down, with shame as less toxic than “pride” … but I think shame IS pride, just the back-side of it. (Refusing to accept God’s opinion of us, whether our counter-opinion over-focuses on our dignity or our depravity, is, at the end of the day, still a deliberate REFUSAL to submit to what GOD says, no matter what we feel or think.) I over the course of my life have excelled in both, with hubris probably being more prominent in my younger years, and shame taking the lead role as I’ve gotten older. But especially as an Enneagram One, this two-sided coin is my constant companion and nemesis. Hence the poem … could I just let it go?
The imagery of this poem is (and hence the title) drawing from Frodo’s journey to and quest to throw the One Ring into Mount Doom.
I could say more but that should get you if it wasn’t very meaningful. People ask me all the time when they find out I write poems if I like this-or-that poet, or they recommend poetry, etc., and I find it a bit funny that not only have I read crazily little poetry, I have a great deal of difficulty even reading poetry. The more poetic the biblical books (say, e.g., Isaiah), the more challenging they’ve been for me. And while I love song lyrics, the same applies: The more poetic (aka allusive/obscure/etc.) they are, the more I’m like “?????” So whenever someone understands or finds my poems meaningful, I’m honored and impressed and, frankly, humbled. Because I don’t think I could figure them out/get much out of them if they weren’t my own! (Maybe that’s why God is having me write them haha, it’s the only way I can really benefit from poetry.)
