The Cost of Freedom (and no…this isn’t a political statement.)

I saw a red-tailed hawk flying above me in our hay field today while I was riding one of our horses. Clear blue sky as his back-drop; he soared for minutes above me- surveying the fields below. And, for that moment I was transfixed as he circled above me, flashing his white wings donned with an ornate black pattern underneath. FREEDOM is the only word that comes to my mind when I see such creatures. Absolute freedom. I felt gratitude, I felt inspired, and truth be told I felt a little envious as well.

I am not this free, and most of the people I know aren’t either. There are times, as a mother, wife, business owner (insert any of the many roles you fulfill here) where I know for certain I’m not nearly as free as I once was. My phones remind me as they ring throughout the day. My email reminds me, that real people with real needs await my actual response. I see the house I live in, the horses who need fed twice a day, the dog, the cats, friends, the stuff that needs cleaned, the bills that need paid, the staff that needs direction, and the children who need absolutely everything. I am not all that free.

I remember in college and grad school having a rule that I would never own anything that didn’t fit in my 1984 Chevy Celebrity Station wagon. I moved frequently back then from place to place; dropping out of college from time to time to travel. Trains, busses, hitch-hiking to Ithaca college to hang out with theater people for a while who were working winter-stock theater. Driving to California with a girlfriend the year after to look for the work we ultimately failed to get. I hooked up with some Buddhists there who taught me many things before I decided to come back to Indiana to complete my degree. My girlfriend traveled north to Seattle with some friends and I was left to make the 20+ hour drive home alone. I remember calling my dad and asking him to come make the drive home with me… that there was a plane-ticket waiting for him at the airport if he would just come to keep me company for the long drive home. We drove that manual Chevy home without a clutch which went out somewhere in Nevada…stressful to say the least but an all-around great memory of singing Carley Simon’s "Mocking Bird" at the top of our lungs and push starting the car at every mandatory refuel.

And there was a trip to Paris I made for next to nothing…where I stayed with some girls I didn’t know, when my Venezualian friend and travel companion was deported for landing without a Visa. I got by on the one word I still knew in French; “Café” as I drank espresso, and smoked cigarettes and read Leo Buscaglia books in the café’s. I met some Arabs there who I could converse with in Spanish, our only shared language. We talked politics and I was amazed at how much more they knew about the world than I did. They’d spent time in Cuba, Paris, and the Middle East. Their world view impressed me. They were the warmest, warmest people I’d ever met. In sum, they fed me for nearly a week and kept their pub open late for my friends and me so we could drink wine and play the juke box when we ran out of money to do anything else. They got us a pass into a club frequented by American models working in Paris. It was the first time a realized that models without makeup aren't very pretty, and that I truly hate club music.

Finally, the trip I made solo to the Outer Banks, where I had vacationed as a child. I camped, just me and my dad’s dog (who I borrowed), in the snowy mountains of West Virginia on our way. I built a campfire in a completely empty campground and was pretty sure I could handle anything if I could survive that bitter cold and isolation. I’ve never ever felt so capable in my life. We made it, that Aussie and me, to North Carolina only to discover it was snowing there too. I was lucky enough to run across an old friend I hadn’t seen in years, who took me in, lent me a much needed shower, and gave me shelter for the week ( I wasn’t really wanting to camp in the snow for a whole week!). Six months later, I married him.

These years of my life; though I lived in absolute poverty through all of it, working three and four jobs at a time to make ends meet and pay for school and food and rent and life; these years were precious because I was so absolutely free. Freedom was a decision to load the car and fall off the grid for a while. It was searching for myself all over the country, only to learn I was looking in the wrong places. It was learning how absolutely trustworthy and compassionate humans are to a traveler without money. This freedom, I cherished. The time alone. The new experiences. Freedom; to me it is as precious as the air I breathe. I imagine that I am not alone in missing it having traded it for something else.

So now, mid-thirties, no longer able to drop off the face of the earth, no longer able to run away. No longer able to fit the things I own in my car. The greatest sources of my joy; my family, my career, my homestead, are also are the things that keep freedom at bay. So I do what most of us do; I trade freedom for security, I trade freedom for responsibility. I trade absolute freedom for something different… not better or worse, but definitely different. Security, stability, the chance to make something of myself, have an impact on the world, and the opportunity to mother my children.

And maybe someday when my kids are grown I’ll join the Peace Corps and work human aid in Africa or move to Alaska to live in a remote cabin. But until then I make substitutions to quench my thirst for freedom. I find smaller ways to experience freedom in a life that feels, at times, quite bogged down with responsibility. It’s not the only means to experiencing freedom, but it is mine- no question, it’s mine. For some it’s a motorcycle, or exotic travel, or a BMW that corners at 80 but feels like 20. For me, it’s my horse, who on a cool day can run faster than I have the courage to go, and who will always chase the illusive hawks with me, as we find freedom together, in big hay fields, on my little slice of heaven; home.

The Dark Side of Gratitude

It is the Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend, and I’m just now finding the time to sit down and write. We took a several mile hike through the 100 acre woods behind our house, that connects to another hundred acres of nature preserve. My children, 6,7 have learned to identify mile markers that lead us from our land to Cedar Creek. The names, to me sound like the Dora the Explorer clues. “Giant Swamp”, “Troll bridge”, “Twin Towers”, “Monkey Island”, and the final destination, “Rushing River”… aka, Cedar Creek.

It’s the kind of day that makes it really easy to be grateful. Beautiful, calm, peaceful… and I felt that gratitude very strongly on our walk. For my amazing family, for (if not so much the house we live in) the land live on, which I love. For watching my husband teach my children about deer trails, and pointing out antler posts. These are the moments I never want to forget. And yet, an important part of gratitude, to me, is learning to be grateful for the less-than-blissful things that enter our lives. The crisis. The big loss. The little lose. The failure, and the trauma. These are the things we are often tempted to meet with resistance. “Why me?” “This can’t be.” are the natural initial responses. Most people try to deny, minimize, and withdrawal from these “bad” things that are also a part of life.

What I have noticed, is that actually embracing the bad, and finding gratitude for the hidden gift, lesson, or strength that is being honed by this negative experience is important- even if you can’t yet determine what possible gift or strength is being honed. The longer you shove away the bad feelings and question, ‘why me’ the longer it takes to learn the lesson the “bad” thing can teach you. In my experience, shoving these emotions away can also lead to depression, but that’s probably another article.

It is counter-intuitive to step into and really experience with gratitude the negative things that enter our lives, and the things we bring into our lives unintentionally. And yet doing so, with an open heart, and trust in the process that is your life, yields healing and wisdom much more quickly than denial or self-pity ever could.

There are things in life that are impossible to be happy about. I’m not happy that after our blissful walk we came home to find the male of the Woodpecker pair that fed from our feeders everyday, dead; his mate at his side watching over him. I hate seeing animals die, I hate that part of life. I hate to witness suffering, I hate loss, and I really was quite smitten with that bird. Yet, it was an oddly intimate experience to watch my daughter pick him up to investigate his body in death. She placed him gingerly against a tree while my son picked the last of the years Mums to lay over his body. Then my daughter and I buried him while she told me what was to happen next with his soul. Death is an amazing opportunity to learn what children intuitively know of life and death; a better way to allow them to develop than to tell them what I think I know about it. Mostly I just listen and learn from their innate wisdom.

So of all the things that happen today, the death of that beautiful bird is my least ‘favorite’. And still, there are gifts of intimacy with nature, intimacy in a shared moment with my children, and a learning moment for them about what life is, and isn’t, to them. All things, though sometimes it can take a lifetime to find the gift, are worth having gratitude for; despite the package they come wrapped in.