Chasing Freedom

When I lived in Japan as a teen, I learned that the Japanese sometimes called the people not from there “gaijin” meaning outsider. Though it’s not always considered a polite name, it always stuck with me.

I’ve lived all over the world and collected names of unbelonging along the way. Not because I don’t feel at home upon many different lands in this nomadic life my soul chose, but because I have always felt like an outsider to a culture that devours life while forgetting what it’s all for.

In America, my friends tell me how good it must feel to live so free. When I’m outside America, people often tell me how they long to immigrate there to become free. It’s very interesting to expereince.

Though this story is many, many generations old, I wonder where we got so lost in chasing freedom outside of ourselves.

An expressive, fast-moving Vietnamese woman in England colors my hair while excitedly telling me how much she loves Trump and wants to live in America so she can make more money.

My heart breaks for the infection of capitalization that has disguised itself as freedom while so many people, numbed by modernity, overlook the sacrifices, blood shed, and innocence lives that built it.

I couldn’t sensor my shocked and confused reaction when she asked me if I love my birth country’s abusive father too. I couldn’t help remind her that he actively harms immigrants, children, women… but she didn’t seem to care much about that. It reminded me of a dream—or more so, a nightmare—I had once about how the media has brainwashed modern women into commodifying their innocence/inner sense for supercial gain.

In the next breath, she asks me how I make money. I tell her im a writer, working on my next book. She responds, “oh thats so hard, you can’t make money unless you write something like Harry Potter,” but follows it up by remarking that I must have a big imagination to be a writer.

And I tell her I do. Not only can I imagine living a secure, free, and abundant life rooted in my true purpose for being alive, but it I can also imagine a world where no one has to sacrifice the value of life for daddy’s dollar.

But I don’t tell her that, I simply let her know that I don’t write to make money, I write to make a difference. She laughed, perhaps in misunderstanding or awkwardness, or perhaps because she hasn’t yet awakened to the value of the feminine voice in this time we are living.

I don’t know her or what ancestral stories she carries, so I don’t judge her journey, except for in how shockingly rude she was to her assistant, another middle-aged immigrant woman, from Eastern Europe, who walked the salon with her head down in shame. Three women far away from their original homes seeking belonging, freedom, and security, with the wounded heart of the child loudly crying out within. This, I can feel and see so clearly.

I leave with the hair I didn’t want by a Trump-loving business-owning immigrant who moved so fast I got enegetic whiplash and some of my hair pulled out along th way. But of course we love the patriarch who will never choose us. Of course we love the father who makes promises but never shows up to deliver. Of course we hunger for the meal of more in a world feeding us potato chips while making us believe that that is real food. Of course we become servants to the material when we aren’t still enough to become present to what is alive within us, longing to be fed, longing to be free.

I can’t help by cry when I get back to where I am staying. Not because I don’t like my hair, but because I’m grieving. I’m grieving for the forgetting. I’m grieving for the mother. I’m grieving for the children so lost inside of the hearts of others they become numb to life and seek love in the abuser who will never love them back. I grieve for all that has been lost.

But I remember how important it is to be a sensitive heart in the world who can grieve on behalf of humanity to restore fertility and possibility to the earth. I remember how much the medicine of a sensitive heart is needed. I remember that’s why I lead other sensitive hearts into their purpose and aliveness so we can ripple out and awaken more and more hearts to what creates true freedom.

And it’s not a patriarchal daddy.

Or a house you can own.

It’s not a six figure salary.

Or building a career for money without joyful purpose.

It’s the village.

It’s union with life.

It’s returning to our innate belonging through joy, love, and connection.

It’s leaving the grind behind and accessing our soul’s fire.

I grieve to remember this kind of freedom, and give it a place to belong.

With love,

Ashley River