The Journey to being "real"

AS many of us try to discover the truth of what being in real relationship means, let us not forget the balance in words spoken in love and with harshness. Let us not forget that to let your guard down and reveal your thoughts and insecurities is not a license to criticize or invitation to point out fault. Sometimes as trust is established in relationship things are spoken in confidence of the context of relationship. Some words of bitterness, some words of love, some words of anger. The following is an excerpt that describes what many have been to afraid to acknowledge as they seek the truth for themsleves..............





Most of us arrive at a sense of self … only after a long journey through alien lands. But this journey bears no resemblance to the trouble-free “travel packages” sold by the tourism industry. It is more akin to the ancient tradition of pilgrimage--“a transformative journey to a scared center” full of hardship, darkness and peril.

In the tradition of pilgrimage, those hardships are seen not as accidental but as integral to the journey itself. Treacherous terrain, bad weather, taking a fall, getting lost --challenges of that sort, largely beyond our control, can strip the ego of the illusion that it is in charge and make space for the true self to emerge. If that happens, the pilgrim has a better chance to find the sacred center he or she seeks. Disabused of our illusions by much travel and travail, we awaken one day to find that the sacred center is here and now--in every moment of the journey, everywhere in the world around us, and deep in our hearts.

But before we come to that center, full of light, we must travel in the dark. Darkness is not the whole of the story-- every pilgrimage has passages of loveliness and joy--but it is the part of the story left untold. When we escape the darkness and stumble into light, it is tempting to tell others that our hope never flagged, to deny those long nights that we spent cowering in fear.

The experience of darkness has been essential to my coming into selfhood, and telling the truth about that fact helps me stay in the light. But I want to tell the truth as well: many young people today journey in the dark, as the young always have, and we elders do them a disservice when we withhold the shadowy parts of our lives. When I was young, there were few elders who were willing to talk about the darkness; most of them pretended that success was all that they had known. As the darkness began to descend on me in my early twenties, I thought that I had developed a unique and terminal case of failure. I did not realize that I had merely embarked on a journey toward joining the human race.
--Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak, (Somerset, NJ: Jossey-Bass, 1999) 17-19.