Authenticity is not unveiled in a swoop of the cape.  That only goes to show the last few days or hours or minutes– whatever the length of time has been since the previous flourish of unveiling– have been inauthentic.  What the flourish reveals is the port of entry to our truth’s harbor.  You enter by submarine.  Your instruments have failed.  The ballast is leaking and the batteries are dead.  The hull is creaking and popping in a very unsettling way, and you settle on the bottom of the harbor on a barge of sand.

(You wait for Hafiz to knock on the air lock!)

Authenticity is what we emerge with.  We need a lifetime to get down to it, and often even the moments of our most uncomfortable vulnerability and of our most passionate honesty are but preludes.  But we can’t know that until we have them.  Without them we would…