True Freedom is of the Spirit

I was just telling a couple of my friends today that it seems I am almost always running away. But from what I do not know. And then I remembered my mother. She was exacting, demanding, unyielding, uncompromising, and most of all, unbound. She had true freedom of the spirit. And that was probably why when I was growing up, I did not like her that much. She was different from the mothers of the other children. And now, I realize,I have become her except for one thing. She was a free spirit from the time she was a child. I am not, even now.

Oh, but there is a chasm of difference between our childhoods. My mother was the first born to a land baron who granted her every wish. I was born the fifth girl to a man from a fisherman's family. When they met, my father's only possessions were wisdom and love. Even then she did not care much about material things. I cannot say the same about me when I was her age. My mother loved and married my father with absolute certainty that even when I had never seen them display affection for each other in public,I could never remember them raising voices to each other.

My mother exchanged medical school for a family with my father. As a child, thinking like an adult in that society, I never would have approved of that marriage, so I understood my maternal grandparents somewhat. Still, understanding is different from compassion. The first one, intellectual, the other comes from the heart. One is immediate, the other takes years of self inquiry to develop.

My mother was so fiercely independent that even after her stroke and after having to relearn the simple things such as holding a cup of tea, and trying to write again, during the years while she was undergoing physical therapy, she refused to be served by me! I thought it was stubborn and stupid since I could do things a lot faster than she could but it was an assertion of the human spirit.

Freedom is of the spirit. It has little to do with the circumstances outside of ourselves. An example of this would be that of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn who, imprisoned in Siberia, wrote Gulag Archipelago and won the Nobel Prize.

We take our liberties for granted until it is taken away from us, and yet even with outwardly free surroundings, one can still feel trapped. It is the spirit that needs to be freed. The body, the personality is only a vessel.

With so many years of education, travel,training, meeting people from all over, going through what people tell me would take them a long time to have done, I am at heart still the child who had only been secure in the presence of my father. The one person who treated me like the son that he wanted so much and loved me unconditionally, without trying to understand. No matter that I was born a girl.

Perhaps, in this lifetime I can even hope to be free and not be afraid to find out who I am. Who is this behind the personality that has lucid dreams of the past? Why do I dream such dreams? Why am I always running away?

Why is it that I relate to Spock a lot more than I do James T. Kirk in the old Star Trek? And just like Spock, I am secretly amused by the humanity of Captain Kirk, and yet I admire it so. Ok. I was just kidding. Or am I?

© 2009 by Melinda M. Sorensson