Do You Remember 17?
A Parable to remind us all
Some years ago, I was confronted with a situation in which I had taken on the care and feeding of a young man who was not my own child, but the friend of one of my children.
He was 17 and in the midst of a parental separation battle. He had been ‘left’ to live with his father in order to finish school where he had been with close friends and teachers for some time…
But the father thing was not working out and he had been thrown to the streets by this man, who claimed to be his father.
His mother, meantime, had moved several states away to her place of origin, but the son was not ready to traverse the distance and lose his connections at HIS home…
And so the boy ended up with me, and his mother, at some distance, called.
She wanted to express to me that her son had no right to make this abrupt decision. That he in fact, must come to her and do her vidding.
That while her ex husband was, indeed, impossible, the boy should do her bidding and come to her.
Right now.
Post haste.
I let her talk it out to me.
Then I asked her.
“Do you remember 17??
I let that sit there for awhile.
Do you remember 17?
You are so adament to have your way. This child is telling you no. He will have his way. He did not come here asking your permission.
Do you remember 17?
If your mother or father would have told you their circumstance of not working their own experience out to make sense meant you have to have an entirely different outcome than the one you had been building, would you just say ‘Yes”?
No you would not.
Every one of us thinks and acts.
No one else can do that for us, or tell us what is so – we know ourselves what is so, and if you find yourself ready to tell someone else what is so for them, you might need to ask yourself.
Do you remember 17?
Because as surely as you remember that you would not bow to another’s demands to not be yourself and do your own plan, no one else will either.
Just think about that.
And then, you’ll understand what real freedom is.
It’s not the health care plan that says I cannot use my own chosen path to health. Herbs, osteopathy, spiritual work, holistic and naturapathic healing – not your health plan that forces me to pay for processes and systems and services I would not use if they were ‘free’; which is the way you trap the poor into using them…
No, I choose real freedom. I spend my dollars as I see fit – on mystics and shamans if I so choose.
and no one gets to tell me .
No one.
It’s not the GMO foods sold in the chain stores that can poison my body with altered genetic material introduced through violent viral infection to the ‘host’ plant.
It’s not the drugs you peddle through your doctors or the financial security you peddle through your retirement plans which all just went belly up investing in fraudulent mortgage backed securities based on fraudulently over inflated real estate values engineered to entice the common man to mortgage himself into abject poverty through designs and devices to enrich the most rich and strip the rest of the world’s population of their ‘assets’.
It’s not your choice. It’s mine.
Whether I choose to worship the God of my choosing, or have a glass of wine, or commune with the flowers, or just be with my family on a lazy summer evening, Or build a space ship or a new way to interact financially with others… No one gets to tell me – how, when what where why or whom I choose to do thos things.
Unless of course, I am robbing you of that power of freedom through device or artifice…
That is freedom.
Some say that is anarchy.
And I say, every time.
Do You Remember 17?
It’s up to you.
The truth is you are the one you are waiting for. And when each of us stops allowing others to define our experience and takes that on as our own job and doesn’t take ‘No” for an answer, then we wil overcome this mallaise which lies upon us and rise up to be the people we came here, each of us, individually with our own idea, to be.
When that happens, a miracle will occur.
Oh, and in case you’re wondering…
The boy stayed with us. He finished school in his school with his close teachers and friends, and he graduated, with one of our boys, with full honors and we ALL attended. 🙂
Yes. If you BELIEVE in your OWN Freedom, then everyone else’s is a given.