To Tell the Truth

You may think that your questions reveal something about yourself and so you hold back. Instead of asking, you are mute. You are afraid to make a fool of yourself or to reveal your patterns of differences. That perhaps it isn't the place where you belong after all. The impulse is to rebel, to be the devil's advocate, to be in disagreement with the voices of pat knowing, to tip the boat and soak everyone with a wake up splash. That was your adolescent past and time to let it go. But maybe the truth is, you don't agree. Your heart thudding in your chest knows the way to truth may be crooked and filled with the rocks of remorse, pebbles of desire, the winding stream of expectation and disappointments. There is always balance between the human point of view and the spiritual and after all, you are not a monk. The short cut seems cut off and how can you consider the years of spiritual discipline anything but the work to get here? If you can't say it aloud, here, to whom will you speak? The obvious answer is through the mouth of a character on paper. Not knowing the point of this chattering monkey is your mind. Perhaps it would be better to pretend. Nod. Follow the path of least resistance and least revelation. But then that impulse comes up. Remember how Michael spoke aloud his lack of faith and will to live, how some came up to him afterwards and thanked him for voicing the doubts they were unable to admit. How the medicine woman thanked him for bringing the shadow. "It makes us work harder towards the light," she said. How later she told you that your spirits were going in different directions. The shock and the relief.
All things considered, you take a deep breath. You open your mouth.