December 14, 2007 – Cold, windy. Northeastern coming Saturday. Camera is ready. I don’t know much about this fellow above. I got him a decade ago at a very classy statuary place in Cambridge, N.Y., that imported their stuff from Europe. I am sure he was on some cathedral in Paris or London. He sits on my front lawn, adding his own perspective to life in Bedlam. Lately, he has matched my mood. I think he has little patience for fools like me.
  I’ve been confronting varying notions of truth lately, not always happily or easily. I like to tell the truth, don’t do it as often as I would like.
  It is very difficult to tell the truth about oneself.
  I think we make ourselves real by telling the truth, or by trying. It’s easy to forget how badly we need to tell the truth in order to be whole. When I first realized I was slipping into the shadows, into some kind of depression earlier this year, I hid it, of course. I told everyone who asked that I was fine, of course, and was actually annoyed when people challenged me about it. I didn’t mean to lie, I don’t think. I just wasn’t telling the truth to myself. I began to crawl out of the shadows when I stopped lying to myself and other people.
  I have to thank Elvis, my 2,500 pould Swiss Steer, a bit. He was the first creature to whom I told the truth. Elvis, a mountain of a thing, is unflappable, and he is focused mostly on hay. He is unimpressed by human moods, and one morning, Izzy and I climbed up to the top of the hill where Elvis was chewing thoughtfully and I plumped down next to him and tossed him some carrots, which he loves. He drooled with considerable dignity and was so stable and unmoved that he was easy talk to.
  I have no illusions that he lifted me up, or understood what I was saying. It was just that it was easier to tell him the truth than a human being who would know what I was saying, react, perhaps even try to help. The Bible says we ought to rejoice in the shadows, but I didn’t. I told Elvis I had slipped into a dark place, and had to go to work and climb out. “I’m in a funk, Big Guy,” and he turned his enormous brown eyes at me and stared incredulously.
   At that moment, I thought, if he thought much, he would have been thinking, how much easier to be me than this man.
   I felt a little foolish.
   The first thing I had to do, I knew, was to tell the truth. And I had begun that morning, tell it to a steer. But I admitted it out loud to myself, and so it became real, and I could tell it to others and get to work. This work was complex – thinking, meditating, reading, writing, talking to family, friends, brooding, existing, admitting the truth to people when it was appropriate, getting help, talking and thinking it through, and thus bringing light into the dark, almost literally.
   I never lost faith that I would get through it, not once. Does that make me strong, or silly?
    And you have to be careful. I think that this can easily become tiring, this truth-telling to people with their own problems, and I’m sure it did. But good friends listen, and the measure of a good friend is that they manage to convince you that they really want to hear what your are saying, whether they do or not.
    I learned who my good friends are. And were not.
    There are so many reasons not to tell the truth, as I learned this autumn yet again.
    For one thing, it’s a nasty habit. You tell the truth about one thing, and then another pops up. I was missing a lot of truth, it turned out, lying to myself and others about a bunch of things I didn’t know I was not being truthful about, or not seeing, or not owning up to. I’ll be sorting out the messes for some time. Truth is a gift. It just leads to better things.
      Sometimes, I wonder if it would just have been easier if I hadn’t gone up to talk to Elvis that morning.
     The answer is yes, for sure.
     But the truth is, I am better, stronger, wiser, more whole. Lying is not a state of grace, but an unnatural, unhealthy state of mind, an act of submission. I choose to try and tell the truth, knowing I will fail again and again.
    It’s embarrassing, uncomfortable, painful, almost unnatural. Perhaps for some protective reason, our instinct often seems to be to lie, and when I tell the truth about myself I rarely come out well, or ahead. Or look good. I just am better, real, more whole, healthier, free.
  A person is, I think, a free being when he is always changing into himself. We are always getting better or getting worse, never static, and I think our development one way or the other is measured by acts of free choice, especially the choice to be truthful, first to ourselves, then to others.
   I remember Thomas Merton writing – I can’t recall where – that the saint sees the truth as something to serve, not something to own or manipulate according to good and temporal pleasure. The truth is not about being self-serving, looking good, denying reality. It is, I think, by definition, often ugly and painful. If we are handsome, happy, healthy, fulfilled, we don’t need much truth.
   I am trying to teach myself, train myself, to pause and think and tell the truth about myself, and not to let me slip away again like that.
   And that is frightening.
   Fear is the greatest enemy of truth, at least to me. I worry about what other people will think, hold bak the truth, submit to the opinions of other people, living in the shadow of other people’s thoughts too often. But living in the shadows of other people is no better than being in the shadows. So thanks Elvis.