Feeling Free - Birthday Message 2005

July 4, 2005

Hello friends,

Like kids who were born around Christmas, I've always secretly considered July 4 mine - the bonfires and fireworks I took as warm-up celebrations for my birthday, July 6.

In two days, I'll turn 60. And George Bush will turn 59. And the Dalai Lama will turn 70. Ever since I found out who shares my birthday, I've wanted to make some something of it (being the meaning junkie I am). Given that we three have been born between two Western liberation days, July 4 and Bastille Day (July 14), and now that I am 6 months away from finishing my book on freedom (Feel Free; Rethinking Freedom in a World with Limits) I'm gonna make something out of that.

All three of us have pledged our lives to freedom. At a material level, W considers himself a liberator of the Iraqi people, not to speak of the Afghani and everyone globally beset by terrorists. His Holiness the Dalai Lama (HHDL for short) has spent decades trying to non-violently liberate Tibet from Chinese rule. And I, too, have spent decades promoting independence - from money worries, but also from the whole consumer mindset. I have, to be honest, sometimes had the fervor (unto righteousness) of W. If you could hear my thoughts (many of which go right by without my notice), you'd catch sentences like, "This consumer feeding frenzy of stuff must stop! Now! I said NOW!". To my credit, I have also had the spaciousness of HHDL, often seeing with equanimity the vast, multi-faceted context out of which our delusional consumer culture arises.

All three of us are also in the soul liberation biz. W has found his salvation in Jesus, and some might read his kowtowing to the Religious Right as a sincere belief that we'd all be better off as Christians. HHDL is, first and foremost, a Buddhist monk engaged in the precise work of freeing himself from illusion at every level - lifetime after lifetime. I am more of a spiritual mongrel. I have the salvation bent of my Western Religious heritage, believing in the Kingdom of Heaven as my true home. I also seek liberation into the infinite now through attention and intention, influenced by Eastern traditions. And I've engaged in Native healing practices, from weekly Lakota sweat lodges to ceremonies with shamans from the lush jungles of South America. As I say in my book,

I’ve nosed along the fences between me and freedom my whole life, keen to openings where something fresh might blow in and swirl out musty ideas or now-dead routines. At age five I insisted on going to sleep-away camp. By eight I’d been to Cuba, by sixteen to Paris, by nineteen I was living in Spain for a year and at twenty-four I went cross-country in an old van with a guy and a dog. I started studying Utopian communities in high school, continued in college and was inventing my own within a decade. Every scrap of income was put into buying time rather than stuff – time to really taste existence up close and personal.

The range of meanings of freedom - from HHDL to W to me - says a lot. It means that the lived meaning of freedom in America in 2005 does not cover the whole territory. A NY Times July 4 editorial this morning had a welcome tinge of Patrick Henry...
The word "freedom" especially seems to have hardened around the edges in the last few years. It has lost some of its ability to suggest the open-ended potential of our lives, the possibility of coming to new terms with the expectations we have been handed by earlier generations. The overtones of discovery the word once had seem to have been put on hold. Instead, there is a new complacency, a certainty that we know just what freedom means and exactly how it should look. There is an unwelcome comfort with the inequitable distribution of freedom even in our own country. There is a poisonous tolerance for the idea that freedom encompasses only the right to say positive things about America and its mission in the world.

The liberal tradition of "freedom from" (tyranny of every stripe, from the state to overbearing neighbors) has become "I can do whatever I want, whenever I want, as long as ... it's my property, it doesn't hurt anyone (ahem... that I can see), it's not against the law or at least I don't get caught." But the freedom of "away" - getting away (with it), going away (from it) and keeping "it" away from you - has to be coupled with "freedom with" - the capacity to be with whatever arises in your life, whether inside your noggin or right in your face. If "away" is the only way to freedom, we're doomed. We do live in a round world. Materials go round and round - never away. People can run, but, given our roundness, they can't hide; away and back home are the same thing. Karma says, "What goes around, comes around." So does the Golden Rule. Anything we won't ultimately embrace, love and heal will meet us again on our next road to Samara - or in our next lifetime.

There's also the profound question, "What is freedom for?" Were we given freedom (by the Creator, by the Constitution, by the embedded principles of the Universe) so we could run, hide, invade, take, dominate, rule, escape, care for only our own? Or were we given freedom to be designers along with the Divine? If so, the holy secret is that limits along with other constraints like containers, boundaries, edges, borders, criteria, agreements, laws, principles, values, covenants and such, are the tools the Universe uses to create. Away and With are both essential. Freedom is the necessary raw expansive power of life, but limits are the shaping power of existence. All the beauty we make - in marriages, in art, in sustainable societies, in great religions - comes from knowing this secret of the "away/with" "freedom-in-limits/limits-in-freedom" paradox and embracing the exquisite tension of living where the two intersect.

For me, personal freedom comes from being present to everything that arises - within and without, touching everything with love. Janis Joplin had it half right: freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose... or gain. Relational freedom comes from knowing that everyone and everything is enacting their freedom, just like me, and is equally worthy of my respect and attention. Social freedom comes from knowing that no matter how dense and encrusted social/cultural conventions might be, they were made up by people like me, and people like me can change them. Political freedom is being engaged in the conversations that create the rules we live by and the collective plans we make. And spiritual freedom is the loving, generative space in which all this arises and passes away.

So there you have it - my birthday message along with a preview of Feel Free. Happy 4th, and for that matter 5th, 6th, 7th and all the rest.

Be well,
Vicki