I’m going to try to get this right, because speaking the truth matters.
This is the inaugural post for The Big At Large, because The Big At Large is about endeavoring to speak the truth.
“The truth about what?” you may ask, or even, “what do you mean by truth?”
The truth about everything, because there is only one kind of truth that matters between people, and that is this: in this moment, I am having this experience. You are not responsible for my experience; you didn’t create it and it’s not your job to fix it, but it’s what’s happening on my side of the equation and if I don’t communicate it, I own the internal fall out from that.
There are many useful tools for hammering out our relationship to, and role in, the apparent material fabric of the universe. There was a time we called it “science,” but, to paraphrase Andre The Giant, the word no longer means what you think it means, at least at this particular moment. There are still facts that we agree upon, but those don’t cause conflict. The ones we don’t agree upon become emotionalized and enter the realm of personal interpretation of truth.
This is where the pain and beauty of human interaction lives, and I feel that there is a very real risk right now of losing the ability, or desire, to communicate these truths to one another in a meaningful way, and to receive these communications. Never in my life has social interaction seemed so fraught; never before have I felt that people who disagree were on the verge of ceasing to speak to each other en masse.
When I ask myself, how am I part of the creation of the problem? the answer comes to me: I have not spoken the truth. Sure, I have said many things, out loud, but as long as there are things I haven’t said, where the unsaid is a cause of pain for me or a corrosive acid in a relationship I care about, then I haven’t taken responsibility.
The shaman’s way is to take the path through darkness and death and emerge as a bridge between the realms, material and immaterial, intellectual, sensory and emotional, wild and domestic, and to discern in the potent alchemy of narrative, analogy, and metaphor, the patterns of dis-ease. The shaman’s way is to remind, and to invite remembrance, of the connection to true health, to self, and to the world of the elements.
It is a path of humility and surrender, and to accept the role of shaman, I must begin with unconditional love, acceptance and clarity towards myself that I may offer that to others. This starts with speaking the truth. Every one that is healed is part of the healing of the world.
So here is a story of love that rests of speaking the truth.
A longtime and dear friend was scheduled to visit me. He texted to reschedule, citing concerns about the virus of the hour and what he assumed was my decision regarding related injections. There was no recrimination or judgment in his comment, and this post isn’t about who is right. But I took it personally. I was angry and hurt. So I slept on it for a couple of days and decided to say exactly that, but to try to say only what I could know for sure was true, which was what I was experiencing. Here is what I wrote:
“I’m experiencing a lot of grief in reading this. I feel pain when friends and family treat me as diseased and dangerous and somehow “other.” There is also fear about the ostracization and marginalization of my family, and where that could lead.”
What’s important is what happened next.
The phone rang.
And we talked about it. With a few bumps and bruises, we got to what was important, which was communicating what we were feeling, without accusation or insult, defensiveness or projection. We didn’t try to hammer out who was right or who was unreasonable, we just acknowledged the feelings and honored them in each other.
I felt immediate relief, but more than that, I felt like something big had occurred. I felt that this is how the world gets healed.
There is no question that there are irreconcilable differences of opinion right now (and always, for that matter, but right now they seem to have taken over the public and private narratives to the exclusion of all else). We cannot agree on what the data means, and there’s much posing as fact that is not. And even if that weren’t the case, even if reality was cut-and-dried and agreed-upon, it wouldn’t change the real issue, which is that I need to tell the truth, and be willing to hear you tell the truth, if we care about each other, especially if we disagree. The way out of this madness is not cloisters, silos and echo chambers.
Yin and yang, order and chaos, and the dynamic balance of the great wheel always in spin requires this: that I stay in the tension of differing experience, without insistence of adoption of my view, or subjugation of myself to someone else’s. That I be unafraid to feel whatever is asking to be felt.
That I speak the truth.
.
If you enjoyed this post, please subscribe to my substack. That is where I am publishing my writing at this time.