(originally posted Aug. 5 & Oct.30 1998)

Her path like her embodiment was both a mystery and a revelation. One could feel her at a distance. One cleaved to her pace and power of walk, as by necessity. There were many who strove to unite with her, many who gave up their lives doing so. Millions has she been betrothed to, as many forsaken by. Call her queen, call her empress, call her goddess or by her common name, call her Liberty.

Sweetness one can describe only after having been touched by her. Austerity only one who has sacrificed for her can declare known. Find the way to her, come man and come woman, come child and come animal, come all natural creations. Tarry not though for she journeys.

I have followed her it seems, from lifetime to lifetime, as though a sailor following the beacons both on shore and at sea. Waves which marked ones will, burnishing deeper the desire to increase the light liberty brings. All the gods and goddesses of humankind’s litany, the noble dramas and deep mystery plays, all but for the goal of transforming its participants, alchemy in high art. By doing one is being. To cleave to her is to be transformed by her.

Alchemy, the sweet perfume of spiritual law, the great road map to illumination, and yet it is liberty that walks first in the procession. It is she who decalres the way open to all, it is she who holds back legions of tyrannists. She who enfolds in her breast the suckling soul whom without liberty, would perish. She is both nursemaid and Leader, harvester and watcher. God send and liberator.

At night when there is darkness and crickets declare themselves an oratory forum, one is reminded that liberty has cycles of chanting in harmony, in great amplitude, echoing as though rounded by a Colosseum. And while at other times one can barley hear her, as though having been buried alive and from under the rubble whispering, “I am here, I am here.”

How to explain to those who haven’t met her, have not even glimpsed her dress, what it is like to be assigned as though a sentinel to their post. Would that I could on occasion deny her my life and my will, I would—but I cannot. A morring to which the soul is ultimately attached, she declares herself in your midst. She declares herself in every fiber of your sentient being, she strips you of masks and replaces them with another. She is jackal. She is wolf. She is goddess trickster.

Liberty has a temperament and a temper too. Storming inside the hearts of humans, sometimes like the gentle lapping of waves against stream boulders in calm seasons while in emergency tsnuamis, one is uprooted without warning and engulfed by her , annihilated because one is nothing without her.

Without liberty their would be no sunrise in the soul, no declaratory moment of arising, No defining exhalation of god in us and appearing. Without liberty we could not sing of freedom and declare love of each other or nation. We could not have and hold in our arm s children whose futures are being dreamed by angels. Without liberty the apple sweet would not arouse in our nostrils, the delight of some godly drama we bite into when we swallow. Liberty, she lays her body out before us, she rises up to embrace our despair. Liberty, she attends to our woundedness of soul and psyche and for those bold enough to do, love her as lover undone, as I do and she heals you.

Liberty, as the heaven goddess instructs the stars of her travels, reveals where her angelic carriage will alight to next. Whether to the hut in a village entangled in tribal war or into the heart of a young man, or woman who sees her shadow in their dreams. Knowing not who she is, they dance as though children in puddles, in her peripheral vision. Skirting about the edges of her passion. Never daring to look her in the eye.

Liberty is gentle, a soft brush aganst cherry blossoms and cold suggestion of snow. In her are the seasons of humankinds unfolding, out side of her, their demise. How to give others what she gives us, who revel in her ordaining of space with an equal measure of tears to wash her feet. Or under her dance as Roman girls did a pillar of stone, undulating in her wake. A marriage of freedom’s concubines, levitating becasue of bliss’s spray. She paints with boldness and bright and somber hue. She bellows in gusty winds shutting doors to our destiny and blowing out the glass of abandoned hearts.

And from in our house where liberty lives we find there courage and nobleness. We find Liberty’s secret. It’s always been there but it’s presence is self annihiliating which for some is salvation and for others terrorizing. Liberty is animated by the holy light of grace. She is a celestial fountain, a pure heart outpouring. She is the brilliant joy of angels and the loving forgiveness of god, an effervescent cosmic weave, a fiery impregnator of the queen of life.

And so for those that journey to the house of Liberty, her light is seen from eons away. Her attributes written in the lives of billions for whom freedom called. And like those before me, those beside me, and those to follow us, servants of this light do not themslves tarry, lovers of her embrace declare themselves fidel to the grace that is our natural environment. To freedom which is our natural state.

Zoh Hieronimus