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Living Arts
The Real Meaning of Freedom
by Jesse Wolf Hardin
I watch as my partner Kiva counsels a group of women in our canyon, here to learn about medicinal herbs and the work of the Medicine Woman. Kiva is strong, not only in spite of her hard childhood and abusive father, her time living on the streets, or making do in the wilderness, but in part because of these things. Looking at her body language, hand movements and expressions, we can see that she is wild and ungoverned, though highly purposeful and self-disciplined. There is a certain deliberateness to her every word and motion, no matter how quick their presentation, as if she has sought well-considered results with each effort. Heeding no master, she is an embodiment of freedom.
In an election year, and during the 4th of July holiday, freedom is likely something we are thinking about, yet often without fully understanding what it means. It can seem confusing, aggravatingly contradictory or hopelessly subjective. In the ongoing Iraq War, we witness one country invading another with the espoused goal of freeing its people even as the local residents rise to battle the invaders; sure they are not just dying for Allah but also fighting to be free. Back in the States, certain spiritual traditions and trends espouse a goal of transcendence, described as being free of the body and all bodily desire, when in actuality, the body serves as a vessel for the expression of freedom in very real ways. These and innumerable other examples highlight how essential it is that we come to comprehend what this freedom that we cherish enough to live, perish and pray for truly entails.
Let’s delve a little deeper. There is no doubt that, in the name of increased security, modern legislation—including the controversial Patriot Act—has greatly impinged on historic personal liberties and the once inviolable rights of the American citizen. Such grievous and hopefully intolerable reductions in liberty are not, however, the same as the elimination of freedom. One has only to think of the many social and ecological activists over the course of the preceding two and half centuries who have written about how much freer they felt in jail (acting on their conscience and doing what they believe) than when they had earlier felt disempowered by unjust laws, controlled through threat, restrained by self doubt and imprisoned by their fears. When I was locked up for participating in civil protest, it occurred to me that I would soon be released and could therefore continue living according to my principles, while the subdued guards watching over me were in some ways doing “life in prison,” with 16 hours a day spent under often imaginary constraints, and the other eight hours working behind real bars and walls.
God or nature—as you prefer—endowed us with free will, which is the freedom to choose and act according to our needs, principles and purpose; to weigh the consequences and consider the possibilities as well as the intended results and ramifications. In reality, even the most oppressed of us are free to speak up, even if we will freely pay the price for doing so. We’re free to do what’s right and to give ourselves credit for it whether others do or not. We’re free to try and thereby risk the effects of success as well as the price of failure. We are free to be wrong and thus free to learn from our mistakes. No matter who we are or what our situation is, we can do the work to liberate ourselves from our own unhealthy intolerance, envy and greed.
We are also free to change who we are partnered with, if it proves not to serve the spirits and purpose of both mates. We’re free to move to another part of town if it will make us feel more at home and in place, or to transplant ourselves to an entirely different bioregion if we feel so called. We can pull ourselves out of bad jobs, at the risk of reduced incomes, and get free of debt with sufficient effort. We are free to vote even if we don’t always like the options, and to protest what deserves protesting regardless of the inconvenience or fines that could result from our efforts.
On the other hand, we can never be free from all fear, although we can learn to use it to alert ourelsves of what needs our attention, and as fuel for an important remedy or timely retreat. We can’t be free of the effects of history even if we are ignorant of its truths, nor get free of the past even though we can refuse to let it define us or hold us back. We can never be free of consequence or from the work of relationships or the messy intimacy of life or free of the need to eat to live or from the fact that we are mortal. We can never be free of our connection to the rest of the living earth, even when flying high above it, nor free of unused potential, anxious for use. We cannot be free of love when it claims us.
In many of these cases, it may be unwise to seek freedom from things so much as being interdependent and achieving conscious engagement with them. It’s best to deal with what we need to and learn from what we are able, as we willingly and actively co-create in our amazing world. Those things from which we should free ourselves–both within us and outside of us, and for both our sake and the sake of others–mandate not our acquiescence, but our full-on efforts to resist, to heal, or to somehow help bring about change.
When aspiring to a freer lifestyle, I have looked to the example of the ancient wandering mystics, ‘60s bohemian hippies or the Kerouac beats of the 1950s, unrestrained not only by circumstance, convention and law, but also by the complex responsibilities of adulthood. Over the ensuing decades, however, I have come to redefine responsibility not as obligation but as the ability to respond... and true freedom is a heartful response. As such, it is not something we escape to, but rightfully claim, and courageously utilize.
I turn again from the river, in time to see Kiva bidding farewell to her visiting students. It shows in their faces, anxious with uncertainty, but flushed with newfound power. Even those who might have come in the hope of reassurance and comfort have clearly been handed the responsibility for their own health and growth instead. “I’m off to help others be as scarily, beautifully and meaningfully free,” I heard one woman tell her, “as me.”
Jesse Wolf Hardin is an acclaimed author and teacher of Animá earth-centered practice. He and his partners offer inspiring Shaman Path and Medicine Woman Tradition correspondence courses as well as host retreats, vision quests and internships in their enchanted S.W. river canyon. Events held in this ancient place of power include the Aug 1-6 Medicine Woman’s Workshop, and the Aug 29th Wild Foods Weekend: Animá Wilderness Retreat Center, Box 688, Reserve, NM 87830 www.animacenter.org and www.animacenter.org/blog.