Though it
may feel like
a
courageously climbed mountain,
independence
is more
of a
slippery slope.
Each of
its manifestations comes
with a
price; each release
attaches
a sometimes-invisible tether.
Country
to country,
economy
to economy,
people to
people;
no piper
goes unpaid.
There's
really only one
freedom
that's free –
that
doesn't entangle the universe
in a
throat-grasping imbalance of desperation.
It's not
the freedom
to choose
what others can’t,
not the
freedom
to have
what others don't.
It's the
freedom to be
who others can't:
the one
true, connected self
of
voluntary gifting and dependence
for which
God created you.
© 2013
Todd Jenkins
Most of the time, I let the Muse pictures choose me. I scroll through the growing collection of my accidental photographs and the ones that speak to me like puppies at the Humane Society, when friends post them. Later, after they've been paired and posted, I sometimes go back to them and see things I didn't notice at first. I just noticed how this picture, from the neighborhood fireworks extravaganza at a friend's Tims Ford cabin in 2011, looks like a lower case "i", which parallels the poem's call to see the case of self in perspective to the case of God.
ReplyDelete