“Artistic growth is, more than anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist knows how difficult it is.”

-Willa Cather, Song Of The Lark.

For much of my life I had little awareness of truth, what it is or how important it is in order to heal and be whole.

In recent years, and largely through my art, my writing and photography, I have grown in this way. I am refining my own sense of truthfulness. It has, in fact, been one of the most difficult and rewarding work of my life.

Love has also inspired me to be truthful. Love has given me something much more important than lies and self-delusion and loss of perspective.

To find love and keep it, there is no alternative to truth. When you’ve not had love, and you find it, there is nothing much you won’t do to keep it.

Even if you have to learn to be honest.

Truth does not – or perhaps did not –  always come easily to me. As I child, I learned to  hide and evade. My life depended on it.

I have a lifetime of mistakes and deceptions  behind me.  It is a great and rewarding experience to learn to refine a sense of truthfulness. To incorporate truthfulness into my life, no matter hard painful or isolating.

I have, for the first time in my life, few, if any,  lies to hide or run from. I am free in a way I never quite defined freedom before. Truth is the Great Liberator.

I have learned that many people don’t care for the truth, don’t like it, don’t wish to be around it.

Because it is difficult, and painful. It takes vigilance and thought and self-awareness.

I wonder if it isn’t human nature to avoid the truth sometimes, being human is complicated and often leads us to necessary compromise and deception. Sometimes we need lies to survive.

Pursuing the truth has meant facing the truth about myself, and that was the hardest piece of it for me.

The writer must, above all things, never lie to him or herself, and after a while, it is no longer a choice: it is no longer possible for me to lie to other people as well, and I never grasped the true cost of authenticity.

This demands that I face the worst parts of me, the hardest truths.

I will never get all the way there, I just keep getting closer. I like the idea of a refining of the sense of truthfulness.

Because no one, not even a saint, can ever be completely truthful in our world. I think conceding that is one of the first steps to truthfulness.

It’s much easier to accept the idea of refining the sense of it.

That is something I know I can do.