Getting There

16 December 2025

https://poems.culturing.net/2025/12/getting-there/

If I should call now, it would interrupt a process
set in motion ages, many lifetimes ago, and that process
is what matters most right now. I believe in you,
but I must not step in any more than I have. You will master
the steps of this new dance, your own steps, not mine or anyone else's,
and only then feel free. But I see a bright future for you,
where you soar in your truth and live unafraid,
needing no other face to express how you feel, knowing your face
is beautiful, and that you can wear it proudly, even when few understand.

But there is an art of concealment, which hides the truth
as an act of love, from those not equipped to handle it.
I think you will know what I mean, most attentive reader,
because I have practiced this art, and I gather
that you have too. But this art remains valid and needed
to keep small souls from bursting with too much truth.
"Mankind cannot bear very much reality" Eliot says,
with good reason and perhaps a little bit too much truth.
But the point is to carve out a private sphere,
a "room of one's own", a home, where truth can be carried
with dignity and courage, to the best of one's ability.

Abilities vary wildly, though, and nobody knows
how or why some can know and some can't. For we knowers,
few pains are as great as those caused by an unjust authority,
forcing its ignorance upon us from the top down. It cannot
be endured, but it must be, at least for a time, until
one has made way for a new life one always was living
in secret. There is an old name for this, μεγαλόψυχος.
"Nobility" also suffices, but what's in a name?
It's the thing that endures in perennial cycle, and we
are the latest crop, ripe for harvest. It is not a crime
to be different, in fact it may be a great gift, the true source
of the patterns lived out by the ones who fit in. Every culture
begins as a dream, and we dreamers can hold our heads high
as members of a higher order, the provenance of dreams.

So dream well, my sweet, and do not despair.
You seem to be getting there.