A new birth of freedom

 

A tearing wind shaking trees and roaring down the valley, rasping dust off the topsoil in the garden. Exhilarating to stand outside and feel the wind lifting my hair and chilling me a little. My puppies cavort like little dervishes and a lone chameleon clings to a swaying salvia branch. Birds are crying out and flying back and forth across the fields and the garden.

 

From early this evening, television stations all across the African continent will begin broadcasting live the inauguration of Barack Obama. A friend in Mombasa has emailed me to say that there are festivities planned all over Kenya, the birthplace of Obama’s father. I am especially looking forward to hearing the poem written for the occasion by Elizabeth Alexander, who as a baby was carried up the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to hear Martin Luther King give his famous speech. Her poem will be on a topic to resonate with the great longing for change felt globally in a time of crisis: renewal and freedom, a theme taken from Lincoln’s speech at Gettysburg:

 

‘… that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.’

Friends who don’t have television sets will be coming over to watch with us and I shall make a large platter of grilled chicken and bacon with jugs of homemade ginger beer.It will be very convivial and probably argumentative, but that is fine. Conflict is nearly always a growth point, if we can keep our egos out of the way.

 

In the meantime I have to get in a day’s work and have coffee with a friend in early alcohol withdrawal who is suffering bad night sweats with tingling  and itchy skin and toxicity-driven anxiety. She is peeved because she thought the pattern of morning hangovers would continue for ever and does not like to think that her alcoholism is worsening. The doctor noted scars on her tongue and warned her she may have had a mild seizure in a black-out. She says he is a gloom-and-doom physician and is reading Louise Hay on self-healing the soul by meditating on colours. She asked me on the phone if the Big Book is ‘uplifting’ and I didn’t really know what to say. Self-healing is always a good idea, but sometimes the self needs a little tough love.

 

We build so many self-imposed prisons, so many metaphysical shackles, and all the time freedom is right there waiting for us.  All I had to do was close my eyes and surrender…