I’ve been thinking a lot about freedom lately. I was wondering today if freedom is the new community. Community used to be the answer to everything for me, but lately freedom seems to be topping the charts. Because without freedom it’s pretty hard to do community good. I think perhaps contentment and happiness is difficult without freedom. I think freedom helps us with purpose, it gives us a sense of control over our lives, which is something I value. But freedom is a mystery. I don’t know how much freedom we can choose to give up and still feel free.

I’m making a freedom mix in honour of freedom. Making it as my prayer for the world. Because despite it’s mystery, it’s important…it is after all the new community.

“Free our bodies, free our minds, free our hearts
Freedom for everyone, freedom now
Let us all be free”
- Tracy Chapman (aka. Trace)

I think I need a mentor. Anyone got any good ideas for who would be good?

“You say you see no hope
You say you see no reason to believe
That this world would ever change
You’re saying love is foolish to believe
That there’ll always be some crazy
With an army or a knife
To wake you from your daydream
And put the fear back in your life

For in this darkness love will show the way”

If we can’t hold onto this, then I don’t know what we can hold onto. This is hope. And I pray pray pray that it is not innocent idealism.

I invited myself for dinner at Merrylands last night because I was missing everyone so bad. It was so lovely. But it made me miss them more. So many rushes of love and affection for people. What dears. So beautiful to see the beauty of that house from another perspective. It has such gentleness and comfortableness and slowness and peacefulness and homeliness and contentedness and constancy. I love it. And I love them. And they make me happy and feel comfortable and content and reassured. Feeling that there makes me happy and hopeful too.

I really miss Merrylands house. More than I was expecting. I’ve seen Nina and Minsik and Claire, but hardly Joe and Gab and Andrew and I really miss them. You get so used to seeing people everyday.

Ah life is so different now. Crazy.

Michael Franti is coming to town! Who’s wants to go?? October…12 (newcastle), 14 (enmore) or 18 (wollongong). SO FUN.

“Active commitment in a community is more or less preceded by a recognition that you are already ‘at home’, that you are part of its body, that you have entered into a covenant with the others and with God and the poor who are waiting for the fruits of community.”
- jean vanier

I jotted down this quote when I was in Mexico and I was reading Community and Growth. It seemed to draw me for some reason, I think because I perhaps felt like I really had that sense of home. I think perhaps it seemed obvious and easy. I uncovered it today as I am conquering all those last floating bits and pieces in my room. Today it challenges me, in a very different light, with the so many changes that seem to be happening in my/our lives. It’s much more difficult to read now and definitely not obvious or easy or straightforward.

It’s one of those moments where you are confronted with the thought that, you thought you understood and had such a clear grasp on the way things are and then you have to chuck all that out the window again and accept that perhaps that really you don’t know anything, and that perhaps, you are just as vulnerable as everyone else. A good reminder. But perhaps not one you want to be inviting in everyday…

A while back we went to this fancy-pancy L’Arche fundraiser. Nina Bean won a bottle of wine which those of us from Merrylands house were pretty happy about. We chuckled even more to ourselves on the way home when we read the label:

“Planting horny goatweed between the vines ensures that the best accompaniment to this wine is an amorous friend.”

I laughed even more when we somehow managed to open it on a night when a L’Arche prayer night was going to be at our house, short on wine glasses…or wine, we found a bunch sharing this amorous drop in the kitchen all from the same glass.