As we enter this new year, I want to take the next three weeks to make daily posts about things I am grateful for. There was an old hymn I heard growing up called “Count your blessings”. So since I believe gratitude begets blessings, (and we all could use a little more of that,) Come with me as we go on this journey of thankfulness.
“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
In 1988, I had the immense blessing of being able to visit a great deal of eastern Europe. My view ‘behind the iron curtain’ was a real revelation. Instead of gloomy hopelessness, I found people who were boldly optimistic. They sensed that real change was coming their way. The old regime was falling and the gendarmes who were propping up the brutality that enforced it, would not or could not stop the wake.
So the next year when back in the US I watched the Berlin wall fall on television I was less surprised than most everyone else.
Today I am grateful for the freedom and also the intrinsic desire each of us has to be free. We see it in ourselves and in nature from the grass that grows in a sidewalks crack, to the native sense of malaise we feel when we deeply intuit that something is unjust or wrong even if we are yet able to yet put it into words.
As cliched as it may seem we do have a lot of freedom in this country and we are blessed to have many of these freedoms codified in our constitution. For the many things, I take for granted each day, the right to worship (or not worship) as I see fit, to assemble together with my friends. And the very ability to write here in this post and not have my words censored may I always be mindful and deeply grateful.
