If I felt that there were any other way I would take that route in a minute. It turns out, though, that saying the thing that is underneath all the subterfuge is actually what’s easier in the long run.

The Realm of Possibility

Underneath the things I’d rather say because they are what I am expected to say or are safer because those words call to mind what has already been done or said by me or by others perches a realm of possibility. It took me a long time to find a dependable pathway to transparency and even longer to understand that we all have access to it. It doesn’t announce itself in a plausible way. There are no grand flags unfurling over it. The place of transparency often exists where there is the most danger, where there is the most darkness, and at the lip of consciousness, not quite knowable until you commit to it.

Public Accessibility to Transparency

The way to it is like being on the high dive at the swimming pool for the first time and not having made that journey from where your feet perch a long way from the surface of the water and even further from the bottom of the depths, where you could end up unable to breathe, unable to surface.

The opposite of Courage isn’t Fear, it’s Immobility

I am not a good diver by nature. Ask my mother who had to jump fully dressed into our local park’s public pool after me once I’d made that first leap. She wasn’t happy and I was bright red with embarrassment not sun burn.

being visible has humble origins

But I did jump and as I got older I started to understand that is what separates people who are vibrantly connected to, paradoxically, deep humility. To be afraid and then to take action anyway is the very definition that people whom I admire have affixed to courage.

sublimity takes many forms

The beauty of transparency becomes evident when nature makes its secrets apparent. There is no right angle or perfect symmetry in the roots of a tree. They take on the route made by rerouting required of them by buried stones, roots of adjacent trees, and, the pathways of underground streams. Trees make no claim on perfect trajectories. They buy time that is etched into their trunks as the art of circuity. To claim their years as your own may mean guesses, hunches, intuitions are projected into their overstory an arboreal bouquet integrating their path with that of the floating clouds.

Trees will give you their narratives if you hug them. I give them mine as often as their embraces receive me in response. So many discoveries have we shared in each other’s arms and when my ashes are spread underneath the ink of them will paint a cover of return.