I will live by the best I can discern today. Tomorrow I may find out I was wrong. Since I do not live by being right, I am not destroyed by being wrong.
—Verna Dozier
**What Liberating Truth**
This morning I pondered how I always sought to build upon the structure of yesterday — seeing growth as a linear path, forever moving from lower left to upper right.
No movement, no growth.
How often did I pass the very place where I belonged, rushing toward some next phase I was not yet able to inhabit. Living my inner life as though the next chapter were mine to dictate and achieve.
A lifetime of seeming mastery. And ample, indisputable proof of my inability to discern my truth from *the* Truth.
Waking with yesterday's unmet expectations. Facing tomorrow's unmanageable obstacles. Shame, fear, disconnection — these were the wages of a self-directed life. And so, more actions born of the same thinking that brought me here. A spiral dynamic, but ever downward.
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Then: how to take this very dynamic and turn it — not against itself, but toward something that holds, that sustains? Something that offers love, grace, belonging, acceptance, a knowingness?
Within each day, each hour, each moment — everything I sought is already here. Everything I ever connived for. *Everything.*
Like Rimbaud in his drunken boat, my illusion of control gave me pain, anguish, an existence that felt hellish. And I sought a way out — always a way out. But after failure after failure, I slowly came upon a knowing: I was never meant to captain this. I never had the capacity, the intelligence, or the grace.
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When I truly acknowledged this, a space opened within — perhaps the width of an atom.
But that was all that was needed.
It is said the universe abhors a vacuum. How much more, then, does it rush to fill any open space in the spiritual center — that ethereal heart which is mine, yours, ours, and no one's.
And so I arrive, at last, at Verna's liberating truth — not as a doctrine to be mastered, but as a grace to be received: *I will live by the best I can discern today. I will be wrong about so much.
And I am not destroyed by this,
For I am ~ Not Alone
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