Your Audience

Dreamer, wake up!

You lie here mooning over a life of labor, a dreary monotonous world of protocol, and endless repetition, thinking, “ if only.”

If only what?

If only you could be a movie star, or great artisan? Or perhaps you wistfully see yourself as the next Poet Laureate, or even another Tolstoy?

You already are all those things, because if you are not, you never will be.

Do you think that one day these people just got out of bed and found themselves famous? Do you honestly believe that theirs is a god given gift that descended from the heavens and fell with a fanfare of trumpets upon their sleeping brows?

The iconoclastic truth is that no matter where the seeds come from, the flower show is won by persistence and sweat and courage.

Creativity is not for the faint hearted. It requires standing up, naked and alone, allowing the world to look at your most vulnerable parts and listening to the jabbering of that maddening crowd who is your audience. A group where some are loyal and others envious and some are using you to further their own careers. It means standing tall when you want to give up and crawl sobbing back under those warm covers where the world is safe and comfortable.

Sometimes it even means listening to those mad ravings because they are the truth and must be dealt with before you can move on. This is the scariest part of all, because how do you know?

You don’t. Not really. You just keep doing what you do and eventually you learn that you are doing it for yourself.

The joy and the honor, the glory and the satisfaction is in the doing. Everything else is a carrot on a stick, but, I admit, sometimes I get a powerful yearning for carrots.