New Years: Youth, Age, Life and Freedom

Man was born free and everywhere he is in shackles.
                                                                   --  Jean Jacques Rousseau
None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest
love not freedom, but licence.
                                                                     -- John Milton
What is the nature of natural, innate, human freedom-- authentic
to our natural, human species? This is almost never asked nor answered.
To know, to have consciousness of, free human life and world; go to places
where there is abundant free forms of other social mammals, preceeding us.
For, we emerged from these freedoms, with these, are a part of these;
or we are diminished and perish.

You can identify human freedom by the company it keeps-- by abundant
free plants and the animals that preceeded our emergence from free
plants and animals. We come from the slow natural selection of freedoms,
interactive with, and dependent upon, many other species. Their
life and freedoms are a part of our life and freedoms.
                                                                           
What is the nature of natural, innate free plants and animals?
These can be identified by the free, unadulterated lands and
waters they keep to. You will not find them and their communities
in the city's land and water-scapes! City-life is conquered and ruled
by a quasi, human organism, engaged in the pursuit of elitist power;
rather than Earth's ecological growth in interactive, freedoms of many
ecological species of life, of which, our human being, lives
and freedoms are part.
                                                                          --  L.S. Heatherly

To be truly free, it takes more determination, courage, introspection,
and restrant than to be in shackles.
                                                                        --   Pietro Belluscb

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men [often unknowingly]
dread it [the real thing].
                                                                --   George Bernard Shaw

Forty is the old age of youth; fifty is the youth of old age.
                                                                       --  Victor Hugo

To know how to grow old is the master-work of wisdom, and one
of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living.
                                                                  --   Henry Frederic Amiell
Nothing is inherently and invincibly young except spirit.
                                                                    --   George Santayana
Behold! I do not give lectures on a little charity.
When I give, I give myself.
                                                                      --   Walt Whitman

That best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love.
                                                                  --  William Wordsworth



Copyright 2015  L.S. Heatherly

Children Born Free: Natural Culture

American Youth of the 1960's and 70's counterculture were told: "Get your act
together!" More recently, the acts on the stages of the Human Circus-Zoo--
called "modern civilization"-- are more automatically programmed via an
artificialization of childhood. But, a deeper pondering asks: of what kind, and
of what merit, are these un-natural, unecological choices! These fabricated
choices made on such slippery, mechanical, digital, virtual slopes!

These choices are provided to our children throughout youth's long, dietary,
spirit-being-culture-mind salad of scientific 'certainty', spiritual-ontological confusion, high-technicized senses and perception, digitalized, cyberized
language and relationships, spiritual-ontological frustration, commercial adulteration, and the ego's inflation.

An inflated ego that eclipses the whole human self -- human self as organismic union of family, community, mind, consciousness, being, spirit and culture; all within Earth-life!

Is this chaos of exploding, fragmenting, naturally evolved, human being and
socioculture merely stuff for social theories, and engineered, corporate,
cultural empires! Merely stuff for humanity as egocentric careers and
comodities! Have not our pesonal selves, our families, our communities, our
cultures and our particular ancestors emerged from, with and by means of,
our long-running, natural humanness; carried through, and around, written
historical time; carried through and around history's enslaved, subjugated, 
human being! Carried primarily, by our innate, evolved, organismic, naturalistic,
Earth-folk Society and Culture! By the Earth-life-Humanity relationship!

Dare we evoke, through deepest human restorations, a deep soul-rebellion!
Shall we proclaim that our very humanness cannot be perpetuated, be
socioculturally reproduced, be sustained, for human posterity without sufficiently
preserving our root human being, nature, spirit and culture, all resprouting
from our, original, Paleolithic being! That we must and we shall, excavate our
200,000 year-old ecovillages as birthrights of our human species!

Shall we abandon achaeology of things for archaeology of our soul! Shall we
replace excavations for career's passion with excavations for lost, wide, deep,
manifold, human loves. Loves, once, innate and free.


(adapted from pg 38, 6, of The Last Human Spring, L.S. Heatherly 2002)

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