The truth of the matter is that the word "truth" did not appear on my original list of Goddess words. But this week, despite complete shuffling of the deck of oracle cards I am currently using, the "Crow" card keeps coming up, and with it, messages about truth and the importance of being true to yourself. Not only that, but actual crows seem to be everywhere in this equinox/season-shifting moment, cawing and chattering their own truths.
Is there only one universal truth? I suspect so, and that it is that "Love is all there is". The Goddess connection is clear. If I slipped right by the word when I originally penned the list, it may be because of how rigidly it can be defined, and how it can slip into left-brain legalistic usages. It also may be because, around the time I wrote the list, I was teaching a course at a community college that used dystopian novels to explore how things can go wrong in society. For years, I led students through an exploration of George Orwell's 1984. Undoubtedly I chose this particular book because it was set in England, but I also saw it as the granddaddy of all dystopian novels. To this day, Orwell's take on the malleability of "truth" is groundbreaking and scarily accurate...we seem to be seeing it everywhere right now.
So I suspect that the word seemed too "loaded" for my original Goddess list -- and it may still be, particularly when referencing "truths" forced on people from above. I'm going to focus, then, on personal truths and inner truths. Because if there is a Goddess being, or energy coming alive in the world, I believe without a shadow of a doubt that She wants humans to be completely true to themselves, to find their personal inner truths and live in alignment with those truths, whatever they may be.
The last year has been a truth serum time for me, as I guess my readers can tell. Earlier in my life, in an effort to protect my fragile inner truths, and to, let's face it, be loved or appreciated or hired, I frequently tried to love things that others loved, or to be someone that others might love or approve of. Over the last few years, and intensively in 2022, the myriad ways I was not true to myself have surfaced.
I'll just give one example that I don't think I have talked about before. As an American born in the 1950's, I was steeped in an appreciation of our country's beauty "from sea to shining sea". I was fortunate enough even when I was young to see the paintings of the Hudson River School, and of western artists such as Russell, Remington and Bierstadt, which presented an almost breathtakingly heavenly image of the landscape. Friends and family members moved out West, and I have appreciatively driven around those states and even lived in Montana myself. Lake Superior's beauty drew me to Duluth in 1990, and may be the one major factor keeping me here right now.
But here's the truth. If, tomorrow, someone handed me a car and the money to do a few months of traveling around the U.S., would I take it? No. In the end, I don't find the American landscape (even the most pristine places) particularly beautiful or approachable. I have no curiosity about seeing more of the Boundary Waters, or the Upper Peninsula, or the rolling fields of Kansas, or the towering Rockies, or even the leafy back roads back east. With the possible exception of Lakes Superior and Champlain, I don't have that "hand to my heart" passionate attraction to most of my country that I do feel for almost everywhere I go in the U.K. That doesn't mean that America isn't beautiful, just that it doesn't resonate with my personal heart all that well. And this is not a huge truth-telling, on the scale of someone acknowledging their sexuality or the nature of an addiction. In the larger scheme of things, it may seem almost ridiculously small.
Yet it is such a relief to tell the truth, to stop trying to be enthusiastic about something I am not enthusiastic about. I don't know what it means for my future, except that aligning with truth in one area may help me align with truth in other areas. And to the extent to which I'm doing my best to represent the values of the divine feminine, it is crucial that all my layers of untruth (no matter how well-meaning these "lies" were) are peeled away, leaving only truth.
