Freedom
“The family was always good to me. I always felt freedom. By that I don’t mean that I could do as I pleased about everything or anything. There were guidelines, standards, and responsibilities for me to operate within. I had the freedom to explore and experiment so I could develop my own character.”
~ Tom Dorrance, True Unity
Recently, I wrote about the importance of having a genuine guide throughout our lives. Ideally, this starts while we are Littles under our parent’s watchful and loving eyes.
As one of the founders of Family Systems therapy wrote in his book, Generation to Generation, “The only problem with parents is that they had parents”. Even those of us who have the best of intentions that are steeped in genuine love and concern, we are still human and chock full of a vast array of foibles.
Tom Dorrance, in the above quote, really speaks to the best parenting possible. Freedom. It’s a bit of a paradox because freedom includes responsibility. And, true freedom is the responsibility to learn our character and calling in life, and then do the best we can to live from that place. That’s integrity.
That place is our true home. Just like we left our birth home as we aged, learning our soul’s home means that as we mature, we “go out” from that place—meaning all that we do, worship, give, serve, and guide others comes from our soul’s home—our original beauty.
Asking ourselves questions like Susan Cain proffers in her book, The Quiet Life, “If I received a terminal diagnosis that I had a month to live, would I still do the things I had planned to do tomorrow or would I consider them to be a waste of my time?”
May we waste not a second of our precious time on this earth. May we be free enough to make sure life is not always striving to “do” but we make time also to just breathe and be. Be still and know that he is God, and we are not.
Mary Oliver put it best in her poem, “Today”:
Today I’m flying low and I’m
not saying a word.
I’m letting all the voodoos of ambition sleep.
The world goes on as it must,
the bees in the garden rumbling a little,
the fish leaping, the gnats getting eaten.
And so forth.
But I’m taking the day off.
Quiet as a feather.
I hardly move though really I’m traveling
a terrific distance.
Stillness. One of the doors
into the temple.
APPEARS IN A THOUSAND MORNINGS
Love, your sister along the journey, k
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