What’s the most life-changing thing I’ve encountered this year? No contest. It’s the in-your-face gut-gripping truth about freedom.
We are taught to associate freedom with something: freedom from…, or freedom to… But freedom stands free of this or that or from or to. Freedom is its own omnipresence, and it is as free at the beginning as at the end – if there were beginnings and ends to be found.
Freedom, for me, has been a long fishing line that has trawled deep and gathered up a submerged shoal of stuff I’d never have imagined would be of remote interest to it. It has fished up pain – both personal and global. It has fished up lostness, failure, grief, contrition, alienation, futility, sadness and depression. It has fished up fear. It has brought all these precious human qualities to the surface to be acknowledged, fully felt and wept over. It has held my pen as I scribbled its dictation, and kept its ruthless gaze focused as my eyes inundated. (Tears! A lifetime’s quota in a year: where were they all stashed away?) It has broken my heart again and again and yet again as I groped for some kind of relatedness that might make me feel known and needed by family and friends. It has showed no mercy, while lovingly embracing my every tiny surrender.
Freedom is simply beyond comprehension. It liberates every known corner of consciousness and every unimaginable one as well. Freedom is a place where there are no life-buoys, no search and rescue teams, no hand-holds, no paths or maps, no cozy cults or religious refuges to retreat within. It is a place beyond time. Imagine that! You can’t. Me either.
No wonder we invest everything we have in serious avoidance of freedom.
So, ok, it’s been a challenging year or three, but going backwards isn’t an option. It’s a one-way tide: destination unknown. But here’s the bonus: freedom has made suffering history. And that’s what has utterly amazed me this year. Suffering is an extinct notion.
Suffering is needing – demanding – that ‘my’ experience of livingness be other than what-it-is.
Freedom is uncensored, unedited and unqualified intimacy with everything, just-as-it-is.
Warts and wondrousness and all.
~ miriam louisa
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this unlit light 
Wow – how wonderful! Freedom leaves nothing behind, it trolls for everything, luring it all in, enticing the darkness into the Light, until everything is revealed, seen, exposed, ripped open… Congratulations on the “extinction of suffering…” I’m just beginning to see this now: Freedom is awareness and acceptance… Twinkle star sister as we ride this Cosmic Tide…
I think the only part one plays in any of this is a conscious intention to remain with whatever Livingness presents – refusing to budge – refusing to buy into the thought-stream that wants to spin out.
Even then I question whether one actually can claim the intention itself.
It’s a great mystery and nothing at all like I thought it would be.
Happy New Year Twinkle!
In love
~ miriam
Yes – I see this too, sometimes 🙂 – just the “need” (?) to stay open and vulnerable to Life living Itself as it does. You have done this so well. But I understand what you mean about “you” not “doing” it. IT is doing you 🙂 Thank you for the beautiful expressions here and on echoes of emptiness, and your blessings of love this past year! With deep regard and love – C
Thank you so much for this candid post. Yes, it is nothing like the “I” thought it’d be.
I’ve also cried and wailed and kicked and screamed. Been in depths of grief, wrath, resentment, bitterness, fury, desolation, and everything else too this year more than any since the direct “knowing.”
I try to assuage all this with the tale of the “tests” of Buddha where he is presented with temptations hell and heaven (telling myself this is only Hell). And this Freedom is neither of those, and won’t be ultimately satisfied in either realm.
I still can get caught in the “suffering” layering (interpretation I myself add to the raw emotion), yet if I can allow the feeling its full expression without saying it should not be happening, than not so much suffering.
btw, my other blog is http://dwelve.wordpress.com — that’s where I ramble a bit more “spiritually” about the “process”
Thanks so much for your equally candid comment dear Evelyn. It seems to me that when Freedom is recognized as an expression of one’s actual essence the first thing it does is clean out the closet, so to speak! Our “teacup ideas of God” get a thrashing…
Thanks for introducing me to your blogs 🙂
In the wondrous crazy Love that we are
~ miriam