FREEDOM by Murray Hidary

What does it mean to be free? 
What does it feel like to be free? 

Is the leaf carried by the wind free? 
Is the soaring bird free? 

I used to think freedom
was the falcon. 
Fast. 
Fierce.
Flying above it all. 

But what if freedom is 
not the flight, 
but the homecoming; 
not the wings, 
but the sky.   

I have walked for years
with a name I did not choose,
with a story that tightened around me
like a coat grown too small. 

But now I walk more slowly,
watching for the curve of the earth,
the rhythm of leaf and breeze,
and I see
how everything leans
on everything else.  

Now I ask different questions.
What if freedom
is not escape,
but embrace?

Is that not freedom?
not the turning away
but the turning toward –
toward the wide sky within,
where no one owns you,
not even your thoughts? 

We do not become free
by running faster.
We become free
by being still,
utterly still,
until even your name falls away.

 There is a place
you have not yet dared to live from —
the place you could not leave,
even if you tried.

A vastness at the center
that does not ask for improvement,
only presence.
And when you finally speak from there,
the words are not yours. 

So where do we look for liberation? 

If we were honest
we’d see we are passengers 
on a causal river, 
carried by a momentum 
we did not choose. 

Is there freedom in any of that? 

What if we can surface the unseen constraints.
To feel the currents that carry us.

And then, to surrender, consciously. 

What if In every moment
we are free and bound. 

There is grace in limitation.  

In choosing what to tend.
To be freed and bound by love.
To be shaped by time.
To belong 
to the turning of all things.

I was stuck on my own freedom —
my selfish freedom —
while all along, 
it has stared me in the face. 
The collective freedom. 
That all of it, 
the system as a whole
is free. 

While no one starling is free,  
somehow, 
the shape-shifting 
murmuration of starlings is.

They have no name for freedom,
yet move as though 
they know what it is.

The starlings taught me:
freedom lives in belonging.

How long I clung
to the small raft of ego,
drifting from shore to shore.

The ego cries for a crown.
But the crown is heavy. 

Am I free?
I feel most free
when I give up
the illusion
of being so. 

Perhaps I am the sail,
unfurled with longing,
and the wind,
the very breath
of the world
moving through me.

Into the hum and holiness
that does not begin or end
with you. 

When I woke this morning
the wind had already gone out ahead of me—
stirring the sea grass, 
lifting the gulls,
whispering something ancient
to the sand.

I walked without reason,
just the rhythm of my breath
and the hush of the tide.
No need to be anyone today.

Freedom breathes — it bellows. 
Contracting and expanding. 
Boundaried and unbounded.
At once known yet mysterious. 
Revealed yet hidden. 
Already known.  
Always known,
but now remembered. 

So come.
Be known by the wind.
Let it unmake you
into what you already are.