Day 15: Freedom

I didn't plant flowers this year. Or herbs. Just didn't harvest them. We went without fresh parsley in our summer salads, without mint in our chilled, sweaty glasses. We did without blooming flowers; our scrolled hanging wire baskets left barren, without the sinewy blooms cascading over its edges. Instead, I collided with a restlessness this year and a crippling uneasiness that stubbornly refused to cease. 

I used to believe that freedom is a clear day, ascending into the clouds, bound on a foreign adventure. The haze of the light reflecting between the glowing fuschia and soft orange clouds off of the metal wings. And now... now I know better. Outside circumstances can be flawless. You can be sitting in an outdoor cafe, enclosed in peace, enveloped by the ones you adore, still trapped in the confines of your mind. And yet you're growing. And growth is messy. Slow. Excruciating, and yet liberating.  When you begin you can't imagine getting any bigger. Or how you'll ever survive. And yet you do...not only do you merely withstand, you thrive. And once you've cultivated something new, a crisp truth unfolds... the buds arrive on their own. Tiny buds, contained with immense possibility. They'll flower in time.  Time. Just knowing this, that bit of conceivable awareness of the potential in this small force of life, is enough. And then you're free. 

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