Living Freedom Archive

Friendly Fire
Brown Fire
Ethnic Cleansing
Combat Insurgence
Defensive Strategy
Freedom Offensive
Mercy Killing
Peace Keeping Mission
Accidental Coalition Fire
War is ugly on t.v.
It’s worse in our backyard,
Mr. Prime Minister.
by Lenore Rowntree, Writer
Vancouver, Canada

One of the primary fictions that governs our lives is that we are in any meaningful sense free. Our way of life is predicated on freedom, and is freer than any other way of life that has ever existed, we tell ourselves endlessly, drearily, compulsively, as sleep-deprived we look out the window at the concrete [...]

Senada is close to sixty, maybe a few years older. The hell she has lived through has taken its toll. The deep sea of grief she navigates has put her off balance — not broken her indomitable spirit, but sent her off spinning through eddies of unfathomable memories. Glaucoma has rendered her nearly blind. [...]

From: THRALL

……when obscenely further back, malefic
democracy broken open,
optionally steps through you
disappearing in the dips
and the bourgeois body
pursued to the limits of faded money
wills not
to jump its shark

impressed into the radiation
a single torrential fusion
draw aside panoptic
collapse of time and space
by none
exacted with more rigor

we, who go through the day
as yet unmingled in ceaseless flux
all the dead [...]

Diminishing the fear that resides inside, engaging the shadows and demons of the unconscious mind and the ego, these are the first steps to liberating others, the world, and ourselves. From this place of compassion we can find the wisdom to live and act courageously in the world.
Peace Activist Cindy Sheehan inspired me to [...]

When I was a young man and needed to believe that my service to my country meant something, I held closely words like “land of the free and home of the brave.” But after serving a year of front line combat in the jungles of Vietnam, I realized just how hollow those words were.
I [...]

I am a great believer in actions following words, and action often means sacrifice.
And what are people, all the activists, myself included, really ready to sacrifice in order to follow their words?
Freedom is a bit like good health, we’re often acutely unaware of it while we have it, and once it’s gone it’s all we [...]

Freedom implies the absence of limitation,
yet by our very manifestation in this life we
are necessarily limited by both body and mind.
To conclude that therefore no human being is truly free might seem excessively abstract, as it is clear that many of our fellow beings experience limitations of almost unimaginable magnitude. But while that abstraction [...]