Who has authority to speak? For themself? For earth? For Who’s? For g*d?
Who has authority to speak while honoring the presence of another?
Speech often gets mixed up with dominion — an ability to have the last word.
Tricksters have the best opportunity to get away with speaking truth to power and avoid a standoff with authority. [Note: A current administration is tricky in getting its way but is not a trickster revealing a larger view.] Tricksters, like Coyote, are able to continue their work by periodically appearing with a teaching for folks open to it. Human tricksters such as Socrates and Jesus [Note: It is never warranted to name a contemporary.] seem to ply their trade for a while before unambiguously revealing their alternative truth to the old dictum that might-makes-right. Their usual modes of questions and riddles are but cover for a release from power claimed by a few, abetted by those fancying to take their place at the top of a pecking order based on imposing their will on others.
Tricksters poke at authority for a long while by using rhetorical ju-jitsu on rigidified custom. They walk a line that plays between outright challenge and irony as a tool of revolution.
Eventually, this pretense is put aside for all the skilled speech in the world does not substitute for the clarity of direct action.
It is only an authentic demonstration of in-born authority that reveals the choice set before the contemporary community. Free of a need to evade or dominate, a simple affirmation will do for the culture of the moment to settle the matter through a sentence of death upon the trickster.
Little is such a moment recognized in its time as the culmination of a long line of tests, a parade of set-ups, to pull a last reversal and birth of a new way. May you continue your work as a trickster until you can’t. Irony plays its part for a while and then steps aside for a simple declaration that now has space to echo.