Living Freedom Archive

I believe freedom is the ability to walk without building obstructing views of oceans, prairies, mountains, forests, and other landscapes.

I believe freedom will come when we collectively in communities decide land is sacred and that people need open places to let their heart lighten, to let their eyes feel the gentle touch of small surprises (small flowers, tree frogs, fossilized sharks teeth in the sand, a skimmer feeding over shallow water), and to halt the chatter of their minds.

Everyday less space is available for ecosystems to perform their ecological services and this is terrible for the health of humanity. But, the greatest tragedy is we are losing the places that can provide us the mechanisms to heal our spirits.

Today at work we were unloading kayaks for the group coming and a small tree frog was in on of the kayaks. We stopped to put him into the tall marsh grasses and he was so very perfect (breathing and heart beating).

We were two biologists but, we thought how can this tiny tree frog exist and there not be world peace. Surely if everyone saw this they would want world peace. We can not liberate freedom without saving every piece of nature still here today. Nature is the perfect model of freedom and beauty.

We must have it to be free. Otherwise we will be lonely, sad, and fear filled. Every time we have less and more sprawling cities we have less chance at liberating freedom. I do want to give immense thanks to the daily experiences I have that liberate me - they are always gifts from this perfect sphere holding water, air, and land sustaining so many miracles of life and species diversity.

Freedom to me is biodiversity and its preservation.

by Karla Klay
Galveston, Texas
www.artistboat.org

For me, freedom begins in the childhoods that we, as parents, are responsible for. If we follow along with what society/culture has coerced us to believe, then our children will struggle and possibly never understand the meaning or value of freedom.

If we do whatever it takes to give them a childhood of unparalleled freedom, they will know themselves and naturally progress on the freedom track. They won’t be bogged down with asinine rules and regulations created to ensure docile obedient adults…adults who have no understanding of freedom.

My freedom lay in raising a free child, in ignoring the remarks of others telling me that I was ruining her life by giving her freedom. I felt freedom radiate through me as I sat, year after year, quietly watching my daughter grow and make decisions according to what she really felt and believed. Her choices came from her heart and were not influenced by what she thought a teacher, controlling parent or even a peer wanted.

Raising my unprocessed child was more freeing than anything I’ve ever done – before or since. And now she soars.

School is the antithesis of freedom. Remove that burden from your child’s life and they will experience true freedom, naturally entering the adult world with a strength that is lacking in today’s leaders.

by Valerie Fitzenreiter, author
The Unprocessed Child: Living without School
www.ubpub.com

People let’s look what’s really going down
In old Suvanna-bhumi there are gems in the ground
No rice on the table — oldest story in the book
Mercedes in a new city of generals and crooks
The Lady’s under lock and key, she says: “Freedom from fear!”
Monks and nuns are on the streets, shine their light through clouds of tears…

Chorus: Arise! Arise!

We’re standing side by side
And if you raise your weapons
We will look you in the eye
until the hate subsides
The eyes of the world
will look you in the eye….

Half a world away I’ve got a healthy pension planned
on slave labor and helicopters — and even heroin
Everything is normal here, everything is clean
Till I turn from 9 to 5 to that shining little screen
The Lady’s under lock and key, she says: “Freedom from fear!”
Monks and nuns out on the streets shine their light through clouds of tears…

Chorus : Arise! Arise!

We’re standing side by side
And if you raise your weapons
We will look you in the eye
until the fear subsides
The eyes of the world
will look you in the eye….

Everyone has the ears to hear the sound when people cry
Everyone’s a choice to make as we walk our own fine lines
So if I call you brother now, how will you reply?
No longer can we just abide in the “eye for an eye”!
The Lady’s under lock and key, she says: “Freedom from fear!”
Monks and nuns are on the street, shine that light through clouds of tears…

Chorus: Arise! Arise!

We’re standing side by side
And if you raise your weapons
We will look you in the eye
until the hate subsides
The eyes of the world
until the fear subsides
until those fires die…

The eyes of the world
The eyes of the world
The eyes of the world

by Martin Adam

Like Moses carrying a staff,
through clear cloth hangs tights an emblem United blue.
A season for change,
a journey for triumph,
though,
this regime takes no names.
We challenge our bodies,
the universal mind,
the existence of hunger,
a dangerous time.
When monks are taken down by force or by frown,
there’s no stopping now,
there’s no stopping now.
We’ll walk with our sandals,
we’ll walk with shoes,
fighting for our freedom,
DO-AYAY our blues.
We wear the colors of our fallen brothers,
sisters,
mothers,
fathers,
blood.
A yellow yearning for a yesterday that could.
White withers away as we stand and pray by this house with great power.
Freedom marches from your best friend’s heart our non-violent hour.

Don’t take a minute to realize,
don’t take a moment to run,
don’t take a genius to understand that we prefer education over the gun.

Stop funding the Chinese for splendor of our Nations lost democratic dream. The veto of the powerhouse can seam hurtful at the seams. We’ll walk a thousand miles if it help’s our brothers and sisters even a foot. Four years have gone by now, and 3000 villages perish in soot.

Now it is our Monks that burned. How dare they take the holy men? First rape was the season, now it’s fire over them. Clubs don’t seem like torture, when black dogs of darkness bark our disease. We’d do anything to stop them as we fade with our immune disease.

Please take that moment to veto, or oven our children’s fire, hey everyone has a hobby, for Than Shwe, freedom is his desire.

by Jeffrey Karl Hellman
Film, Photography, and Visual Arts
Roy H. Park School of Communications, Ithaca College
www.JeffreyHellman.com
www.HonoringHome.com
www.ICFAB.org

Being free is a universal need. Wherever there are living beings there are personal and social movements towards love, understanding and being free.

I have enjoyed exploring what it means to be free by using processes that are themselves free. I play and record improvised music and also host a radio show where I interview people about social change and spirituality.

The Great Leap Forward airs weekly on Free Radio Santa Cruz, 101.1 FM, www.freakradio.org The radio station is an experiment in being free by being the media without any outside authority; FRSC is commercial-free, collectively-run and has been operating without a license from the US government since 1995.

Ever since I did an interview with Native American activist/musician John Trudell, I often choose to use the words “being free” instead of the word “freedom.” He pointed out to me that freedom has become “a habitual, lazy abstraction.” Trudell offered his personal way of liberating freedom; “Life is about responsibility,” he told me. “Freedom is an abstraction. Responsibility is not.”

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I would like to say that I have some world changing statement to make concerning freedom.

Perhaps to say that I had crossed the very ethers of time and space and glimpsed a daring look at freedom. Maybe even to have the audacity to say that I and I alone know the true meaning of freedom.

That I have reached that wonderful state of enlightenment that reveals all the answers to mankind’s questions would be a humbling thing to say. However, none of these are me.

I do know that I believe in freedom in many forms and shapes. I believe that my freedom does not necessarily equate to another’s meaning of freedom.

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Let me don my clown wig and big shoes, and tell you a little bit about the wisdom of the fool. In the tarot there is always a dog biting at the heels of the fool. That dog represents the constraints of society. The fool does not notice-she continues merrily on her way, with a grin that says, ‘If I can’t laugh in your spiritual revolution, then count me out.’

The fool is the trickster, the crow, the dervish, the changeling, shapeshifting, adapting, aware of the impermanence of the so-called person. True to the diamond self, indestructible. The fool was the only one in the court who could question the king, who could mock the pompous dogma of the day.

Back in the eighties, punk rock was all about tearing down the structures of hierarchy, the ways of power over. “God Save the Queen – she ain’t no human being,” the Sex Pistols sang, laughing in the face of dogma.

Of course there were some severe limitations to this tearing down – nothing was really raised up in its place. This is why spiritual activism is so key. What was missing from punk rock, to a large extent, was compassion.

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There is none better…or more effective method to liberate personal freedom than to sit in quiet and hear the voice within — as often as possible.

Such meditation has been known for millennia to be THE way, not just to freedom, but also to personal discovery, personality integration, inner peace, balance and the eventual release of fear, the root of all evil.

Sitting in silence is the sine qua non for anyone interested in their psycho-spiritual growth.

The voice inside is the voice of the One Source and Center that gave us life and created each of us as unique individuals. The aim of this sacred voice is to bring us into harmony with our infinitely loving, forgiving and caring Creator, a harmony that provides for our health and well being while we mature as human beings. We all know this “harmony as being in the flow.”

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