[Image Description: evening sun shining from behind bare trees in winter, reflecting brilliantly from a small stream]
What is the truest, most beautiful truth you know for yourself right now?
Not the “truth,” external, imposed, from out there.
No.
I want to know the deep, quiet beauty that is so lovely it seems impossible, the truth that whispers in those quiet moments when there is no droning of pundits or parroters or pontificators.
The truth that glimmers, otherworldly, resplendent, abundant, beckoning from the realest part of you.
The one that is so warm, so healing, if it spilled over it could change the world.
When you glimpse it again and sit silent, remembering, let it tease the threads of your imagination long enough to coax it into knowing less ephemeral.
Let its golden radience permeate your awareness and then nurture it, returning to the silence, whenever it feels dim.
You need this now, your deepest truth, when external “truth” is pulled taut between two extremes and one is clamoring even more violently for your allegiance.
You need the touchstone of the beauty of your inner mooring to untangle the lies, to see clearly, to set us all free.
[Image description: winter meadow in the morning light]
I want to be a whole person.
I said this while sitting on my therapist’s couch one clear, autumn day. I couldn’t explain to her exactly what I meant, only this was the truest expression of my insides in words.
That was several years ago. I haven’t seen her in a long time.
What is my truest expression now?
I’m certain it still has to do with wholeness.
We are taught we can divide our way to wholeness.
Sheer off the undesirable parts of ourselves, the ones that cause discomfort with their messy, messy truth.
Divide ourselves from others who don’t look like us or think like us or fall in line like we were taught.
Divide, segregate, deny, shun.
And if we do, if we listen to the external, self-appointed authorities out there, we will possibly, one day, attain the ideal.
The ideal what?
The ideal cookie-cutter, uniform vision of success, spiritual or otherwise, as they define it.
Then we will be wholesome, acceptable, holy in their eyes.
All that’s required is to ignore that still, small, voice, deep within, whispering: wholeness can’t be found out there, can’t be defined by them.
You cannot divide your way to wholeness.
Turn and listen to that voice. Gather up the discarded petals you dutifully left trailing behind you as they watched.
Push through the double-dividing doors and run, hair-in-the-wind, into the meadow of your own knowing, arms wide-stretched, heart echoing:
[Image description: five apple seeds on a bamboo cutting board.]
Standing, slicing, contemplating how this crisp apple doesn’t resemble apple blossoms, or apple trees, or even last year’s windfallen fruit rotting underneath, yet the potential for these are right there in the seeds scattered on a kitchen cutting board.
Scraping, haphazard, into the compost bowl, mindful of gaps that surface between the ways I want to be, but am.
The way my irritation over a stranger’s rudeness at the supermarket bears no resemblance to my aspirations of love and tenderness for the world.
The way my patience wears thin with others when I’ve procrastinated and now need them to rush, my uncharitable reactions to other drivers on long commutes in traffic, my lack of curiosity when presented with an opposing view, all falling short of the poetry my soul sings in the woods.
My own contradictions and hypocrisy on display, so unlike the beautiful way of being I wish to embody.
It bears considering what potential I’m cultivating, allowing to germinate, and grow.
Those words hoard power to a few, leaving others in shadow, dehumanized, no questions asked.
Clinging to absolutes, to subordination, exploitation, indoctrination, will harm, destroy, and separate, but never be as powerful as all the beautiful questions.
[Image description: Two bare trees in a shopping center paring lot, a single branch from each reaching out to the other, touching in the space between.]
Heart full of poetry and problems, trying to bend without breaking down completely.
Waiting without knowing what will be its worth.
Will time tell by giving birth to wholeness? Or will shame, separation, sorrow, fight it out forever?
Can poetry solve problems? Will healing ever come?
Not sure it’s possible to co-create connection, healing, hope, with nothing but this severed cord and glimmer of a different way.
Wondering if hidden in the waiting for what some of us experience as God and some as fate and some as no-god, nothing, is the mystery where that alchemy can happen.
What if the ends of healing depend entirely on the means
and those means are vulnerability, grief, seeing the other’s pain?
What if healing is an active waiting? Help and rest. Intention Care.
Perhaps what we do with waiting is the poem of the hour.
[Image Description: Dirt path along the side of a meadow in Rocky Mountain National Park, mountains in the distance.}
What will people think? Always bear that question.
They will know we are Christian by our christian values, christian t-shirts, and prayers around flagpoles at public schools we don’t even attend because we are separate, not of them.
Listen to us, your elders, we will show you the way you should go, to mold you into the perfect christian image.
You will not lie. You will not mock. You will not disrespect. You will not forget your manners. You will not lust. You will not cheat, or you deserve just what you get.
If you disobey you deserve the blistered bottom, the lost meals, the harsh words, the shaming, the threat of being shunned. And you will call your friend and tell her you can’t attend her birthday because you broke the rules.
These are the consequences I learned.
You taught them from your sanctuaries, your kitchen islands, your youth group bible studies, your conferences, your words, and I believed you
until I didn’t.
Until I saw the fear I was painting on my own children’s faces, the pain I caused, the shame I inflicted, when I doled out the same manufactured consequences.
Love had to be another way.
Love is kind, patient, protects, does not grow calloused to another’s pain.
But you said I was going astray, ruining them. They would never know right from wrong.
Now I see that was the ruse all along.
To excuse lying if it gets you the court seat To excuse mocking if it only targets “them.” To excuse disrespect if you think it’s deserved To excuse lust if it might have been a joke To excuse gaming the system if it gets you what you want.
To think the end justifies the means, while keeping us all from seeing the means are often everything you told me was wrong.
You would have been my elders but now we’re just adults on different paths with different understandings of God.
I know this sounds like anger. I have been angry. I have argued and tried to convince. I tried to go and never look back.
But I now I see another truth: We’re still part of each other. We were all caught up in the same misguided tide. And my rage, my desperate attempts to convince you, my wanting you to be ashamed for your complicity, have roots in the same poisoned well.
More shame or pain or hurt will never turn the tide. Even if the ruse tells us it’s deserved.
This is the hard part, it calls for courage, for unguardedness I’m not sure that I possess.
I still have far to grow.
I know I can’t come back, But I can be here, arms unclenched, in this loving, spacious wilderness, holding this painful tension, trying, while love beckons you with kindness, with patience, with your own new path.
Because the good news isn’t politics and anger, punishment and fear.
It’s letting go. Breaking free. And finding life anew.
The Forest and the Trees 