Re: Can you be bound and free at the same time?

One of my colleagues was asking about the difference between being in debt and acknowledging those that came before? I blurted out the question, "Yes, can you be free and bound at the same time?" I think of my heros, like Nelson Mandella who took his prison and transcended it daily and then used the very experience of his imprisonment to mobilize a people, to bring healing to a nation, but for most of us, a cage is a cage and prison is hard, no matter what we have learned from it after the fact.

Prisons have transformative power, because on some level, they –in there hard, cold way-are an acknowledgement. Acknowledgement of what? Of power. Some of us are in prison, because we are a threat –a threat to notions of decency, a threat to notions of tradition, a threat to notions of privilege and domination.

Some of us are in prison, because we simply cannot bare to be free, from all that what came before. It is what we know. It is familiar. My self-created and self-imposed cages are still a recognition of power- even if that power is turned inward and it is still a reaction to a threat.


Sometimes the threat of having to live outside the cage, outside the definitions that have been handed to me. There is no coincidence that suicide rates are high among those returning from war and those who have been released from prison after a long time. It is hard to live on the outside. Outside of what?

Outside of the inheritance. Living outside the inheritance can be like throwing open the windows, it is just too bright, too much all at the same time. Freedom can hurt the eyes, there is a period of readjustment and then the shock and possible grief that you lived in the dark all that time, when the world was full of color.

In those moments, I have to remember-everything that made the cage make sense. I have to remember what the threats were that were so compelling that I had to put myself away, beyond life itself. I try to remember what made me fight like hell to keep the glue of the cocoon on me, so that I could hide. I remember and then I validate my process, “Yes, of course. Of course.”

And then freedom comes. Beyond the cliché of unleashing myself from my own prison, there have been many key holders in my life. Far from individuation, I know that I am made up my relationships. Some come bringing maps, some come bringing tea, some come bringing laughter, some come to simply sit in the dark with me, quietly and silently, then walk out the door. I see them leave and I remember that I can too. Some simply use their own and remind me that I have my own.

And what is freedom? Sometimes freedom is simply deciding to live. Sometimes freedom is to decide to pick up the phone and call someone and receive them when you have been told that you are worthy of nothing but rejection. Sometimes freedom is a hot shower and remember that you have a body and it is yours, now. Sometimes freedom is telling yourself something new when everything around you looks like the same old thing. It is acknowledging all that came before without giving my power away to the story, because it all serves. As one friend put it recently, “I am broke, single and without a place of my own, but my Spirit is in tact.”

Freedom is self-imposed.