I think the most important words I have learned on my long and bumpy hero journey are “I don’t know.” I have learned that true  wisdom is understanding what I don’t know rather than what I am certain I know.

In my time as a journalist who often interviewed brilliant people, I was surprised to see that every single one of them knew how to listen and say the world “I don’t know” to  questions everyone else always answered. The smart people learn by not knowing.

The insecure and the fearful and the angry can’t say those words,  they think they have to have the answers to every question.

That is the sickness of the left and the right, of our crippled political system. Everyone knows everything, no one can ever say they don’t know, so they have no need to listen or bend.  Every conversation is an argument, not a dialogue. People listen only so they can speak.

Nelson Mandela and I have at least one thing in common – a startling beginning to a sentence- we both survived by being humbled. It was one of his most famous quotes, in fact, “I survived by becoming humble.”

Me too. Humility was not something I chose, I got it by having my face pressed into the mud.

Falling apart on my mountain was humbling, humility took my ego and arrogance and squeezed like a Graham cracker, crumbling it to bits. I am a follower of Beavis & Butthead. Because I am stupid, I am free. Because I fled college, I never learned what I was supposed to think, so I can think.

The first words I said to a shrink I finally got to was “I don’t know what  happened to me.” Good, she said, that means you can learn what happened to you.

I am writing a lot today because I have been opened up this week.

Our friend Mary Kellogg the poet fell and broke her hip, and her 88 years of life changed instantly. She is now living in an adult home and not on her beloved farm.  She hopes to get back there.  Our friend Ed Gulley the farmer has an inoperable number of brain tumors. He has refused further treatment.

Someone I trusted hurt me in a particularly vulnerable way.  My dog died.The larger-than-life people are not larger than life, they are life itself.

I respect life, and I am coming face-to-face with a lot of it. This is a testing time, a growing time, a learning time. I have never felt stronger, or clearer, or more humbled.

This morning, a message from Ed’s wife Carol that he wanted to see me today. It wasn’t urgent, he wanted to talk. I said no, I had to work today, i couldn’t come.  it felt bad, then good. This was important,  I have to keep myself, those are the  boundaries of love. I can come tomorrow, if wanted.

Beyond that, I am sad at the anger and cruelty that seems to be spreading like some awful virus through the very air. I do not despair, I see great light ahead. I have great hope, there is a new beginning just around the corner. I am waiting for it, there is a great awakening.

This too, is humbling in many ways. It feels like a conflict between divinity and humanity is tearing me and taking place inside of me, pulling me apart inside, and pulling my world apart outside.

I think I spent much of my life crying outward for someone to fulfill my needs and console me. No one could or no one did.

I felt that way over the weekend.  But I have learned instead to cry inward, to the place where I can let myself be held and carried by my own idea of God, the inner spirit that  is the center of me, my soul.

That is the incarnation of my own sense of empathy and humanity, my own community which is with me always, the place I have learned to go when I am  hurting.  That does help, it does heal.

And beyond my own anguish, there are human hands that will hold me and show me faithful love. I respect life, I do not deny it’s choices.

I am comforted again and again by a very simple but somehow liberating realization: I don’t know. I don’t need to know. I am crying inward, tears of the heart.