Streams flow, emptying into earth, sky, and the continuous current of change.
“I’m tired of not speaking my mind.”
Someone said this to me recently, in defense of a rather blunt and somewhat hurtful comment they had made to someone else. The situational context mattered less, it seemed, than the individual’s need to “tell it like it is”, to be honest.
Truth is a tricky thing. It can sway under the weather and wonder of moments. Like blades of wheat reaching vertically in time’s fields, we move laterally in response to the winds of our days, bumping into each other, becoming entangled, forgetting to keep our attention on both the source of our yearning and the anchoring of our being. The sun shines generously, impartially, on us all. And yet we jostle and position for perspective as if somehow our roots can be transplanted in richer soil, longing for a loam that is free from our common ancestry, our collective existence.
I made a face while eating dinner the other day. My wife and I were sharing a meal inside a recently screened pergola we bought and built in our tiny yet fertile backyard. July has been growing hotter. Sitting outside after sunset in the peak of an Arizona summer seems a bit like a meal resting in a pan freshly removed from a stove’s heat. Volume sags. Presence pulses. The future is poignantly certain yet the moment oddly bursts with unworried relief, acceptance.
That’s when I took a bite of dinner, briefly chewed, and felt the muscles of my face alternately contract, relax, and turn slightly askew as I swallowed. The sequence was unrelated to any conversation; we were eating in silence. I was blissfully empty of thought. And then I swallowed and, as if spontaneously sprouting from a place of majestic nonchalance, a memory arose: how my father sometimes swallowed. This was no image, not some visual remembrance of Dad at a particular place and time. I was simply he. He was me. I was swallowing not as I remembered him doing but as he and I were, had, should be doing together, a gesture of concurrence manifest outside the landscape of time and separate identity. I felt and saw myself looking, acting, and feeling like him.
This hasn’t been the first of such fleeting fancies of blurred beingness. I’ve had a few similar experiences in recent months, a sensation akin to catching water droplets on outstretched hands beneath a cloudless overhead sky. Everything coalesces. Thought ceases. There is only the ineffable recognition of shared now.
I don’t know what is true. And I am increasingly cautious of speaking my mind. Because the reality of what, who, and how we are seems so much more complicated than what the narrative of our personal timeline suggests, the stories you and I construct inside the walls of our isolating identities about ourselves and each other. What does it mean to be honest? Is it helpful to release without filter the often unflattering and turbulent commentary generated by an ego’s memory field onto the outstretched vulnerability of another? It sure seems like the right thing to do when someone else releases part of their own troubled tumult. “Oh yeah?” a voice hollers inside. “You want to know the truth?” Writing those words here, I hear that voice inside my own head. It is a four or five-old’s, maybe my own four or five year-old’s, confronting some emotionally-charged challenge or perceived threat. It is joined by other young, frightened, or indignant expressions of defiant self-defense. They sound like taunts from the sidewalks and street corners of my youth. Sitting with them, however, I hear them merge, into a single plea for recognition, and then softly recede into the soundless posture of humanity sitting on the curb of summer dusk and just wanting to be understood, nay, to be held. We don’t want to fight. We have no desire to be arbiters of truth. We just want to know that truth exists, that it somehow is able to hold our hand, whisper in our heart, touch our spirits with its buoyant beauty.
Aaaahhhh. Release and relief just rippled across me. I can feel myself stretching once more, upwards, toward the dimensionless future, downwards, toward the interwoven past, and outwards, toward you.