I admire my wife, which is, I think a good thing. It helps a marriage to both love and respect a spouse. Every morning, I revel in her fashion choices for shoveling manure. Sometimes she does it in her wedding dress, and always wears her $8 imported rubber  French boots.

“Your wife is not like the other farm wives,” a neighboring farm wife told me once. That, I thought is quite an understatement. Maria is not like anybody’s wife. She is herself, her same self all the time.

I want to say humbly, that I believe this is something we both share. I believe I have also learned to be my same self every time.

A woman at a reading last year said a wonderful thing to me, she said, “you are always the same when I see you, you are always yourself. You don’t put any false hats on…”

That is a high compliment for me, and I hope it is true.

Maria is always her same self, whether she is climbing on a ladder, planting in the garden, making her art, or shoveling shit in the pasture.

To me, finding out who I am was one of life’s most important and cherished experiences. Every day someone writes me to urge me to be someone else, to be softer, easier, sweeter, to have fewer opinions and express them differently.

“I love your writing and your blog,” someone messaged me the other day. “But sometimes you are cranky…”  I laughed at this, I wrote her back right a way. “You bet, ” I said. “I am often cranky and have been since I was six or  seven. It is called being human. The thing is, I don’t ever pretend to be something I am not, if I am cranky sometimes, which almost all of us are, you will see it, you will never have to wonder who I am today.  I don’t put on a false hat. You may get the good me or the bad me, but you will always (I hope) get the real one.”

I’m surprised at how radical an idea that is.

It is a gift to me when people scold me for being me, because it allows me to reaffirm myself. My identity is precious.

Believe me I have changed, more than most people can imagine, and as many of you have witnessed for yourselves. You are the most loyal people I know.

But at some point in life, we either get to the core of ourselves or we don’t. We find our center or we don’t.

“You have to trust the inner voice that shows the way,” writes Henry Nouwen. “You know that inner voice. You turn to it often.”

I believe I have more changing or growing to do, that will never stop, but I am now my same self all of the time. I have found my center, it is my safe and enduring place, it always tells me if what I am doing is right or wrong.

And I’m not putting on any other hats (except the red ones from Etsy). Every day, Maria inspires me to be me, and she is always her same self.  She doesn’t ask herself what to wear when she goes out to shovel manure, or what she should change into when she goes to work in her studio.

She accepts me the way I am, and I accept her for who she is, and I can’t say how much that means to both of us.

I think of all the people in my life who told me there was something wrong with me or have scolded and lectured me for being too this or too that. I am done with them, sick of their messages, and good riddance.

This is the path to freedom.