The Only Honest Place

Track eleven opens Movement III, and it is the hinge of the whole album - the place it turns from the cost of camplessness to the gift. The song does its work by reclaiming a single word. Every camp has got a fence, and a post where the fence has a gate. They will hand you the word honest, and they will tell you it means stay.

The song takes the word back. The only honest place to stand is out past the last fence post, alone - where the truth kept going and you had to follow it, or call yourself a liar in your bones. That is the turn the whole record was building toward. Honesty was never staying inside the boundary. Honesty was following the truth wherever it actually went. I did not set out to leave. I set out to follow a question, the way an honest man will do. And the question walked me to the fence and it did not even slow.

The song does not pretend the open ground is comfortable. It is cold out past the fence, I will not tell you that it is not. But it names what the cold bought. I never had to stop a thought before it reached its end. I never stood beside a post and called the stopping faith. And the bridge draws the line clean - they can keep sound and safe and faithful, but honest does not live inside a fence. This is where I stand, and the song finally says why with no grief in it - it is the only ground a man can stand on and not be lying where he stands. And I would not go back through that gate.