What It Means To Tell The Truth
Liberation, Christina Mokwa + Katherine Alt (2025)
Digital collage
What It Means to Tell the Truth
(in 500 Words or Less)
To tell the truth means to ask three questions —
What is most true to me?
What do I fear?
What is most difficult to say?
And then to breathe life into the answers.
To tell the truth is to let go of a world of comforting ideas — of bad actors, good parents, and ultimate salvation — usually in the form of a well-dressed man // to tell the truth is to leave behind the supposed safety of the conventional and convenient // to tell the truth is to do so publicly, forever forgoing the sacred yoke of shame.
To tell the truth means to acknowledge one’s place as actor — Puck, Oberon, Titania — but to never fall for the seduction of playing to the gallery // to tell the truth means to go off script — to the surprise and delight of the gods.
To tell the truth is to purify your body of unwanted spirits — your mother’s grief, your father’s lack, your grandfather’s broken back — brought all the way from Sicily // to tell the truth is to say goodbye to those intergenerational interlopers —the ones that fall to the most sensitive in the family // to tell the truth means to accept inevitable misunderstanding — and to weep at the weight.
To tell the truth is to embrace the unglamorous — to chop wood, carry water — to till, and sweat, and ache // to tell the truth means to take the risk of form — to pray, knees bent, at the red temple — to bet on the goodness incarnation can bring — to give all of your money away.
To tell the truth is to know that a realized soul is your only inheritance, one that must be claimed, day after day.
To tell the truth means sitting through your eight-hour deposition with a ramrod-straight back — to say yes, and no, and absolutely not — to not succumb to the animal fear in your shaking calves.
To tell the truth is to honor the sublimity of silence, to understand that whatever you say cannot compete.
To tell the truth is to wake up and realize how short on time you are — to marvel at the beauty of the birds, the summer tomatoes — and to commit yourself to endlessly telling about it.
To tell the truth is to be a quiet revolutionary.
To tell the truth is to simply leave the dinner table — plate untouched — instead of nightly attempting to split it clean in two from the ages of 7 to 17 // to tell the truth means to relentlessly keep your side of the street clean — to celebrate the smallness of tidying your sacred corner of the world.
To tell the truth is to drop both sword and shield — armed with nothing but empty hands and skyward eyes full of God.
Telling the truth is swearing a thirty-year revenge, only to find everyone — everything — more worthy.
*Written work by Christina Mokwa – © Christina Mokwa/Mokwa LLC/Mokwa Creative Company
