14. Natural Freedom
Natural freedom is not a separate, exclusive condition. It is an all- encompassing vision of the world as a whole, the human as a whole, the cosmos as a whole, the holy whole. One doesn’t discover freedom, one presumes it, breathes it, lives it, is it.
Natural freedom is instinctual. It is beyond qualifications, outcomes, and strategies. It is expressed exactly in the same way we kiss. The essence of a liberated freedom is naturalness, an attunement to our uniqueness. That means that no two of us find liberation the same way. No two of will “be natural” in the same way.
Watch yourself dance and you’ll see what I mean. Look at the way you write. Or smile. Or walk. Or talk. Uniqueness is the quality that makes freedom so fragrant. That’s the challenge for the thousands of workers on an assembly line at General Motors, or the millions of faithful Buddhist monks and nuns living around the world.
“No work is insignificant,” Martin Luther King said, reminding us of the power of fusing dignity, naturalness, and freedom.
“All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence. If a man is called to be a street-sweeper, he should sweep the streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep the streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say: ‘Here lived a great street-sweeper who did his job well.’ ”