Yearning for freedom
Hello Hedge Schoolers,
The fingers are hitting the keyboard on the tail end of our third lockdown in Victoria. The freedom we take for granted up for grabs. The cage...our homes. And for many, this is solitary. Confinement with our thoughts. With a stillness that highlights the illusion of freedom. Alone with the monsters, we find ourselves snagged.
And so in this time, we need expression. To language how we are feeling. To language the inner landscape.
Personally, poetry is that language for me.
Why?
Well, I wrote a poem for that. This is called Whisperings.
I scream at you
in whispers
WAKE UP!
But stratus clouds
hang you up and out
A weathering of scalding tumult
From vantages within reach
I plead with you
to ride the ephemeral out
Impermanence is...the only permanence
Catch an inhale
Ride an exhale
with freedom
for
the only truth
is
always waiting, always here.
The inner resistance of our own being
Poetry is more than a few lines that sound nice together. It is how we meet moments and make sense of the only thing that we ever truly have.
The current moment.
But people resist.
They resist the poetic with all their hidden might because if they don’t, the power of words speaking in their own heads would burst open their inner doors, and all the monsters breeding within would come bounding out and crashing on the floors of their consciousness. What would hold their inner frames together then? They have to suppress the poetic, or accept it only on blurred terms, or promote its cruder imitations, for the simple reason that they have long ago begun suppressing eruptive life and all its irreconcilable shadings, its natural paradoxes.
Ben Okri - A Way of being Free
We find ourselves in mind cages of our own doing. Stories stuck on repeat that scream us into submission. Lead us scurrying towards anything that will make it stop.
Towards escape.
Towards drowning.
Wake like Dante
Later, in the middle of the road of our adult lives, in a state of utter forgetfulness, we may wake like Dante, in a dark wood, looking for some inner compass bearing that will steer us to the freedom of that horizon again. The inner compass almost always leads us back toward that childhood we have spent so much time trying to leave behind. We return there not to become a child again but to remember those instinctual joys which filled our imaginations and growing bodies and set our enthusiastic course into the world. There is something trustable about the original enthusiasms of the very young that point directly toward the way we are made.
David Whyte - Crossing the Unknown Sea
Before our submission to the will of others, our parents, society, work, etc...we were free. A unique expression brought into life with a distinct gift to give to the world. But we lost it along the way.
Not by accident but by design.
And there are ways to find it again. To be in communion with the gifts that we are tasked with stewarding into this world. To honour the transmission.
Honouring the transmission
When a powerful idea comes through, you have to get in motion to animate it.
Christine McDougall
Pausing and taking stock of the big ideas that call out to us is how we honour the poetic. Big Ideas or what Christine McDougall of Syntropic Enterprises calls Source Ideas are clues from the Universe. Reminders that we are called here to play full out. To be stewards of gifts that are ours alone to tend to but not ours to own.
Big Ideas wollup us awake. With the emotion required to get us in motion.
And if we sow the seeds of that great idea in the right ecosystem, magic happens.
So I honour those with the courage to get in motion around great ideas. Great ideas that honour their poetic expression
Courageous Stewards
Georgia Ellis - https://www.bluechipminds.com/monthly-masterclasses.html
Leslie Lau and Shaun Cooper - Thttps://www.true-north.co/
Christopher August and Johnny Buffalo - https://www.christopheraugust.co/
Michael Lauria - https://forgingexcalibur.com.au/programs/
Jordan Bates - https://www.refinethemind.com/ouroboros/
Cara Bradley - https://www.carabradley.net/project-b3/
Christine McDougall - http://syntropic.world/
Jiro Taylor - https://www.jirotaylor.com/shambhala-warrior
Benny Wallington - https://www.bennywallington.com/online-programs
The list is not exhaustive but each one of these amazing folk has helped tend to my ecology of growth and are living examples of souls living their gifts alive.
And it would be great to see your name above also.
Practicing what I preach. This is mine - Mental models for optimised thinking and sensemaking.
So trace back your steps. To the moments where you most alive. Breathe in the emotion of the original genesis of that idea. Allow it to swallow you and kick start your forward motion. Freedom lies in every moment.
Till next week,
Steve