The truth is not just what you say. You can wait for your lawyer to give you the oily words that will get you off the hook. But truth is lived, not spoken. It is what you live, and how you live. Truth cannot be hidden. When the dust of the explosion that tried to destroy it settles, whatever you tried to conceal is more visible than ever.
If you have something to hide and if you are afraid of the truth, then this is the terrible, inescapable truth of the truth. It will come to light, just as reality will emerge from the ashes of the illusion that tried to evade the truth. This is true not only of deeds done. It is also true of a truth repressed in our minds and memories: a feeling that is too painful to face, a mistake too hurtful to admit, an insight too transformative to welcome.
Unless we come into the open and let the truth expand in the light, we will be hounded, and we will be on the run. Meditation is living in truth. In the light—in the open.
After meditation: “Yellow Sonnet” by Paul Zimmer in THE GREAT BIRD OF LOVE (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989), p. 26.
Yellow Sonnet
Zimmer no longer wishes to write
About the dimming of his lights,
Recounting all his small terrors.
Instead he tells of brilliance,
Walking home from the first grade
In springtime, light descending
To hold itself and dazzle him
In an outburst of dandelions.
It was then he learned that
He would always love yellow,
Its warm dust on his knuckles,
The memory of gathering pieces
To carry home in his lunch pail
As a love gift for his mother.
