Sorting the wheat and tares in my garden of ideas…
As I sit here on, what is for me a rainy Saturday morning, deciding what to blog about, I found this blog by Cedar Sanderson on Mad Genius Club about “Building a Blog”. I found it while doing my daily WordPress reader cycle, and went and made a long comment about my own peculiar strategy for finding daily topics for blogs.
I explained that a lot of my blog is news/event related, drawing on my days as a small-town community news reporter. I also expressed a theory to think small, and to write about what interests you, with all the focus of your interest.
I ended by mentioning that I still needed to choose a blog topic for today. So Cedar so helpfully suggested a blog on ideas, that I could write on “the cultivation of ideas, sort of like gardening? If you don’t plant them, they won’t grow.”
Cedar doesn’t know that I instantly thought of a quote from C.S. Lewis, part of his Four Loves series, I think, about how if you don’t tend it, a garden doesn’t stay a garden long, you have to tend it, water it, weed it, etc.
Which made me mention weeds back to Cedar. Something always grows, weeds or otherwise, unless you count on the weeds growing.
So let me jump on the idea of ideas, instead of all those other tangents.
When I started blogging I always wanted to write about important things, important topics. The issues of the day. I think I am an editorialist at heart. But preaching only seem to work for the congregation, or the choir, and depending on the number of pastors you surveyed, they might have some cogent points about how effective that is sometimes too.
So the use of ideas, and the presenting of ideas, needs to be done in other ways. Such as Cedar’s suggestion of gardening, cultivating. A garden takes time. You plant, you water, and as Paul says in 1 Cor. 3:16, God gives the increase. You can do a lot, but there are some things you cannot control.
I think all my blogs, even the event ones, are ultimately about ideas. They present a view of the world that I either agree with, or challenge, but I cultivate and tend the view to promote a particular outcome that I think is positive — the garden.
A lot of people don’t bother to tend the garden of their mind, they let any seed fall into it and grow, from any source. Other people don’t let anything outside in; they are closed, stagnant places. Then there are others who seek out new sources, and blend or graft them into the structure of their garden to form a coherent, harmonious whole.
I can see at this point that my metaphor is taking a lot of stretching. I used the word graft, which applies more to an orchard than a garden, but both growing things. Which is a good way to segue to another point — metaphors.
Because rather than the cultivation of ideas, i think the cultivation of metaphors (which are a type of idea, I suppose) is more important. Ideas engage us intellectually; metaphors engage us creatively. I was going to say emotionally, but I think too many people would misunderstand me. and I think creatively is a better choice, anyway, because it requires engaging both intellect and emotion, both heart and mind (note that heart and mind are metaphors — vs. intellect and emotion — which pair of words is more powerful in influencing you?).
In my newspaper days, both at college and later in the “real world”, I noted to myself, editorially, that one of the easiest ways to lose an argument was to let the other side set the question. There was usually a bias in the question that predisposed it to the other side. Never answer the question as given. Find the real question at the heart of the issue, and answer that.
In the same way, we need to make sure we don’t let people set the wrong metaphor for us. Metaphors are world views, big or small, and the wrong metaphor can have drastic impacts on our lives and outcomes. So cultivate your ideas, but, more importantly, cultivate your metaphors.
(That really is where I should end, but I can’t help putting in this post script. Use of metaphors is at the heart of why I don’t like modern churches trying to edit hymn texts — they are messing with metaphors. The scary part is they aren’t even seeing the metaphors they are destroying — they just see words.and “ideological goals.”)
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