Liberation's Garden by DJ Rankin - HTML preview

56

“So, you and Timps, huh?” asked Liberty, as she slipped into the rope swing gauntlet long abandoned by bedtime.

“Me and Timps,” he confirmed. “She’s a good one.”

“You got that right,” she agreed. “One of the best. And she seems to be quite taken with you too, so you can’t be all that bad.”

“Unless she’s just covering for me because I cook for her.”

“True. Plus there’s the part about her getting along with pretty much everyone, but I’ll keep that one to myself and let you keep on keeping on.”

“Thanks for that.”

“She grew up here, for the most part, like me. And in a setting without the scarcity of us and them, she never developed a concept of anything other than family, and she carries that relation with the world wherever she goes.”

“Sounds like this other woman I met one time, sort of, I’d almost convinced myself she was nothing more than mirage.”

“Maybe she still is,” hinted Liberty. “Maybe she popped into your bubble just when you needed her nudge the most, the instant you were ready to listen, and what’s it matter anyway, the person you’ve spiraled into all on your own seems more than real to me.”

“I was far from on my own,” he confided. “I’m here because of community. Sacred relationships with incredible people. A sacred relationship with the Earth. So I wanna hear more about what it was like to grow up with that all along, before you go fading away on me again.”

“It was unbelievably magical,” she couldn’t help but understate. “But you had no reason not to believe, because everything you experienced only solidified the magic, and it never faded away.

There’s a reason kids believe in magic, it’s because it’s real, and they’re still connected to that original understanding of a world beyond explanation. Growing up doesn’t mean forgetting where you came from, doesn’t have to anyway, it’s only through the indoctrination of disbelief that we force feed the next generation of jaded existence. When everything you’re told contradicts what you already know inside, eventually it wears you down and convinces you that it was all a daydream, that there’s nothing more to life than falling in line, and if all the grownups seem to be okay with a meaningless life of mediocrity, then maybe they’re right.

But here, it was different, the magic was sacred, it was nurtured into abundance. You didn’t sit around wondering if there was more to life, you already knew there was, and every moment inspired you to go out and grab it by the reins. And you learned to appreciate that abundance, to hold it close as you share it with the world, you understood that the gifts of the Earth were not to be squandered, as that sacred relationship only sprouted further abundance. So how could you not believe?

I wasn’t taught to trim away the crust as I kept only the choicest bits. We didn’t cut down nature to construct more convenient access to her. Besides, our concept of convenience hadn’t been corrupted by a complete lack of participation. Our whole world was at our fingertips, everything we needed was right here, and everything she needed was within our grasp. All of life was convenient, because convenience didn’t mean zero effort, it meant walking outside and finding just what you were looking for, because it was all right there in front of us. There was no want for an easier way to skip through life, because who in their right mind would want to skip all of this?

If I got a piece of crust stuck in my teeth, I just picked up a splinter and pried it out, how could it get more convenient than that? Then I discovered how that other world defines their dependence on the dollar bill. The toothpick factories and forests, the oil burned to minimize wages, trucks and transit and little plastic packages, and just how large a footprint could one little sliver of convenience be worth?

It didn’t sound like convenience at all, it sounded like an awful lot of work, and waste, and destruction, but then I realized that the convenience was that all of that was somebody else’s problem.

They’d all bought into the myth that money creates wealth out of nothing, because they’d been removed from the living world that was paying the price. But from my perspective, it was clear that money was merely a tool of limitation, I could see it drying up the abundance as they all chased it into their own little individual hidey holes. They were lost in a living of hiding from life, scared to exist beyond the comfort of denial, to the point that somehow it felt more convenient for them to burn away a lifetime, rather than step outside and experience any of it.

It made me sad, you know? Sad for the people lost in the world, and sad for the Earth they’d forgotten they were a part of. It’s like it’s some kind of sickness that’s infected us, a post traumatic amnesia that we’ve spread into the veins of our mother. And my prognosis of progress, was that we had to do something soon, before she fell too ill to support us.

But I knew better. I’d known better. I was a child of the Earth and I could feel her pouring through me. I could manifest abundance as long as I held it in my heart. And I knew then, that my path was one of sharing that energy with the world, as I do everything in my power to heal the fractures that imprison her.

So anyway, that’s what it was like, for me anyway. And now to have a sanctuary like this to come home to, gives me the strength to give everything I have, to out there. And no matter how far I stretch myself, I know that this place will pull me back to my Earthly center as it recharges me for whatever’s next. And now it’s your home too, and you’ll feel the overflow of abundance filling you up, and as long as you hold it tight and give it away with every opportunity, it doesn’t run out like some limited resource, it multiplies like love, and gushes light into the darkest corners of this delusion of scarcity.

Can you feel it?”

“I can. I felt it the whole way here. Most of the way, at least. I felt it pulling me through the shadows as I already had everything I needed to find my way home. On a deserted mountainside as I shoveled dirt all day long, I felt it. In a camp under constant threat of gunfire, I felt it. Up a tree surrounded by razor wire, I felt it. In a poverty stricken FEMA trailer, I felt it. Restricted by only what my horse could carry, I felt it. During the shortest days of a white out winter, I felt it. Staying on the streets with those who live there, I felt it. Alone in the woods with Timps and a waterfall, I felt it more than ever.

In fact, the only time I felt lost as that essence drained from my spirit, was my slightest foray into conventional wisdom. And like you say, every little angle was poisoned by scarcity, and therefore the dollar, because without a substrate to contain the overflow of life, no one would ever forego living as they resign themselves to merely doing what they have to do.

I’ve felt the ultimate freedom of knowing that regardless of where I am, as long as I’m with my heart, I’ll always have everything I need. And that knowing, has brought a depth of fulfillment that the me you first met, would have sworn was nothing more than a fairy tale. But it’s real, maybe the only thing that ever was, and now that it’s inside me, I couldn’t imagine ever being willing to give it up.”

“And you shouldn’t, it looks good on you. And you’re right about being a different person than that tender snack I scraped up off the sidewalk. Sick of the cage and terrified to take those first few steps away from it, but by the time you worked your way through the adversity of escape, you transformed into a creature of creation who was ready for anything. You weren’t ready for the LG back then, you could never have fully absorbed this energy until you unblocked the pathways in-between. The journey was your destination, and because of that, you found your way home.

You weren’t ready for me back then either, just a five minute taste took you over a year to process, but you stayed committed to the cause and evolved into someone I feel like I’ve known the whole time. There’s something deep inside you that I can feel exploding into the world, it’s not unlike the thing I feel inside myself, and it’s pretty pleasant when I just give myself over to the crashing waves of energies becoming one.

Anyway, I have to confess that this wasn’t entirely a social call. I’m here for a reason, a rendezvous of resistance, we’re only in town for a night of gathering ourselves and tomorrow we return to the front row. There’s an extra ticket if you want it, I can’t promise punch and pie, but I can guarantee there’s no convenience surcharge, and you already know the adventure that’s out there waiting to be unearthed.

Besides, it might give us a chance to discuss the finer details of your purity pledge.”

* * * * * * *

The world circled on her never ending path of revolution, a web of life connected the synchronicity of her grand design, Miles looked down to find his feet firmly planted back at square one. His bag was alive with seed and root, his hair grown full of Earthly experience, his threads looked like they’d seen the better part of a year, and maybe the less than better parts too. He caught his reflection in the window, the last time he stood here he’d been too paralyzed to pay attention, stuck in the fray of a crumbling existence. But the person standing here now had put miles behind him, the grip of civilization no longer held dominion, he was just one person living his change.

The camera panned up on a pair of approaching chucks, there was something in the stride that felt familiar, Miles recognized the blank stare of unexpressed potential.