This double headed eagle represents power over East and West, then eventually it was adopted by others to symbolize the power of church and state.

I wanted to write about freedom. There so much trouble in the world right now, so many power hungry people trying to dominate and take away power from other people. It’s saddening and frustrating.

I keep thinking that the more we can change ourselves, the more we can help others change. I keep thinking about if I can break free, then I can try to find the keys to break others out too.

Then I was going to write about separation vs unity and how governments are using tactics such as “divide and conquer” and propaganda etc etc.

But I’m kind of at a loss for words. What really is freedom? It means different things for different people.

We all know people like artists or musicians or actually any profession who seemingly are at the highest level of creative freedom and expression yet are battling demons in such a way that leads to depression or drug addiction or alcohol abuse or whatever.

Which is why for me (if you’ve been reading this blog at all), freedom starts personally. Like we all have our personal prison labyrinth with multiple levels of mental walls, physical walls, emotional walls, and spiritual walls. This is why “break throughs” feel like you really broke through something.

What kind of break through does a person who is lacking personal power need to have? Why would this person need to take power from another person? What kind of fear is running around in their brain telling them to take power from people of a certain gender or people of a certain race? And what kind of fear is in people that think it’s ok?

So many factors from education and upbringing to belief systems etc. We have a lot of work to do. How do you show love to a hateful person? How do you show non-judgment and non-prejudice to a judgmental and prejudiced person?

We often chose our battles like giving a homeless person some money vs not giving a person a home based on income and credit score. Or judging a person’s haircut vs not judging your own dental hygiene.

All this separateness is moving us in the opposite direction of unity. Sometimes we might see unity and think that individuality would disappear, but I think individuality would prosper since we would be free-er of judgement.

This is the paradox. To have freedom, it’s gonna take work and discipline. And those words don’t sound super freedom-y at all really. But we chose this life didn’t we. So let’s work. Everyday. And sing while we are doing it. Sing songs of freedom. Everyday.