It’s been a couple of weeks since my last entry;  my cousin passed from a heart attack, then my dog was diagnoses with leukaemia, then my dog was re-diagnosed after her blood tests came back more positive than they needed to be….compounded is the fact that this year, I had to resume chopping down the old lilacs on the north side of the yard–you get the picture.

When I was a kid, I had this problem.  I had it in my mind that people wouldn’t like me for who I was because I came from a home where there was alcoholism, I had this attraction to people of the same gender, I was fat, all kinds of reasons for people to not like me.  So I spent a lot of effort creating stories about who I was, where I came from, because in my mind I thought people would like me more if I was just more interesting.

What I didn’t realize was that people knew me as that kid who never told the truth.

When my family moved from the town we were living in to the city I live now, I looked at it as an opportunity to start over.  So I resolved not to lie any more.

Then something happened.  I fell in love with my best friend, Cory.

I had spent the better part of my life trying to hide the fact that I was Queer.  I had done this even though just about every person around me knew it, and those class mates who felt the need to belittle or bully me would point it out.  I couldn’t tell anyone, and when I finally did get to the stage where I was able to admit to myself and the people around me, I’d realized that once again I was in that place where I had been lying.

Honesty is a difficult thing not because the truth is difficult.  Truth is never difficult.  What is challenging about honesty is that it forces us who embrace the truth as a virtue to admit that honesty pushes us into sometimes very uncomfortable positions and situations where we have to be vulnerable.  It means being prepared to admit that we have made mistakes, owning up for the damages those mistakes may have caused, and being willing to reconcile to make things right.

When we surrender to honesty, we grant ourselves the permission to go with the flow of the universe.   As difficult as it can sometimes be, the effort to engage the world in honesty provides us with a more harmonized existence.

Honesty gives us permission to fail, to learn from our mistakes, but to be diligent in how we approach ourselves in the context of our world, and our awareness.