Authentic voice

I spent the weekend at Western Half-Yearly Meeting in Sorrento, BC, a gathering of Quakers in western Canada that I have attended most years since 1994. Again I felt the opening, welcoming community of those I have watched grow and change. That experience, and listening to what I had to say to other people, has helped me to further name the journey I am on, which is about finding authentic voice, and about growing the courage to speak with that authentic voice in full awareness that others may find it uncomfortable, may react, may feel that it is inappropriate. I am ready to leave my life-long strategy of carefully tuning my self-presentation to suit what I thought I knew of my audience. In that process, I think I will probably discover that what I thought I knew was often wrong. And will often be confirmed in my prejudices.