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01/13/2005 Archived Entry: "Feeling "sparkly" about freedom's potential"
ONE OF THE LOVELY YOUNG LIGHTS OF LIBERTY wrote me the other day. She's a young woman whose name few people know at the moment but who has the potential, I think, to be a future star. Encouraging to know a few such people are out there!
She wrote, among other things, about how sparkly she'd been feeling about the freedom movement. She really used words like sparkly. Glowing. Light-hearted.
She never said "optimistic." I'd have run for the hills if she had. But she conveyed beautifully the bright glow of things beginning to stir ... that sense of, "Could be, who knows? There's something due any day. I will know right away. Soon as it shows ..."
She said her boyfriend (another terrific friend to freedom) had the same sense.
And what's weird is that I have, too.
For several years, I felt nothing but total doom. I felt as though I had to go on just because I had to go on. My choices were to compromise with evil and lose my soul forever or to stand there like a rock until the waves of tyranny crumbled me and wore me down to bits of grit. And that means I felt I had no choice at all, because to compromise in any major way with what I know to be wrong simply isn't in my nature.
But starting just over a year ago a totally different feeling began to grow in my heart. Sparkly, as Ms. Liberty Light said. It's grown and grown. There's a buzz in the air. Over at The Claire Files and in real life, things are happenening.
Not big things. No, so far all the big things in the world are going pretty damn bad. But small, important things. Energetic, committed individuals -- sometimes also laughing, joyful individuals -- are opening the tiny little cracks in the big wall of unfreedom. The networks are building, the meetups are happening,
the plans are a'making. Freedom lovers are moving beyond the Internet into real-world communities. They're refusing to stand still, and the directions they're moving in are exciting and sometimes even wise.
I know of at least three or four promising new books scheduled to be out in the next few months, including Vin Suprynowicz's first novel, the superhero tale, The Black Arrow. I get wind of guerrilla publishing projects and new types of communities that other people are working on, running with the Freedom Outlaw concept and lifestyle. (A few years ago, I used to get a lot of mail that said, "Claire, lead us!" or "Claire, what shall I do?" Hated that. These days, I get, "Oh, by the way, Claire, I've just taken the Freedom Outlaw idea and done 16 nefarious community-building or monkeywrenching things with it. And thought you'd like to know I've gone you one better on the whole concept." That I like.)
My own collaborative Great Mystery Project should be sprung on the world this spring. Though I'm still (cuss, cuss) not allowed to say what it is, I think it'll be the best and most important thing I've ever done. And you ought to see the other things that we're ... ah, but now that would be telling. :-)
The GPM may, of course, be part of why I feel sparkly -- a feeling not native to my pessimistic nature. During the recent doom-and-gloom years I was working on The State vs. the People then Innocents Betrayed -- two worthy projects, but neither exactly geared to fill a body with sunshine.
The GMP -- if I can tell you nothing else about it -- simply roars with adventurous hopes. It was also personally fun for me to do, stretching my talents to the limit and rewarding me for the sweat. And I did it in the silence and solitude of the Desert Hermitage, away from regular phone service or a reliable Internet connection, and therefore away from the constant stream of bad news the world manages to generate. Here at the Hermitage, we've also had several visitors who quickly became both family and community. Many people have come out of the blue lately with gifts, tangible and intangible, straight from generous hearts.
Still, this god-forbid sparkly feeling began long before the GMP was even an inspiration in the night. It began before I had a thought of making a four-month desert sojourn. Before I met these freedom-living friends.
It's not an always-on thing. Believe me, any mention of VeriChips, Alberto Gonzales, ChoicePoint, or the BATFE can still drench the sparkly moment in muck.
But ... well, do you feel it, too? Go over to The Claire Files. Watch the people Making the New Happen. That's what it is, you know. Suddenly, instead of the world of endless bitching, there are small groups -- not just one or two like the Liberty Round Table -- but many small, spontaneous, unorganized groups of people saying, "I'm not going to wait for freedom any more. I'm taking my freedom where I can make it ... and I'm passionate pals are coming with me." I've never known a year with so many good, liberty-loving, moving, doing friends in it.
Posted by Claire @ 11:18 AM CST
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