how can we all be free?

You sit there in your heated house in shorts while it is cold outside wile others are cold and wet with no shelter at all; with your twentieth pair of fashionable shoes while a child puts cardboard in his for soles; you vacation repeatedly when a grandmother can't even get to the grocery store; the work you do that produces nothing other than your profit (or that of the corporation) while refusing to pay the person harvesting and serving you your food. 

You imagine that living smaller is doing without. You imagine that living smaller means you'll have less, be less, do less. But let me tell you what living smaller is really like. Living smaller is about realizing and sinking into what is really important. It is spending time doing what makes your heart sing. It is connecting with family and friends and the earth; even connecting with future generations because living smaller saves the earth for our children.

Is it radical? It seems radical because it does not serve profit, and profit is the real God of this culture.  Let us radically change this culture to one of inclusion, of love, of cooperation. For it is in working together that great things are accomplished: in loving each other, in listening, in hearing, in loving . . .

Some years ago, I attended a writing workshop put on by Appalachian Peace Education Center for Martin Luther King Day, and I think it was led by someone named Carolyn Kesters (at least that's what I wrote down). We examined Dr. King's Letter from Birmingham Jail and the assignment was something akin to, "What would you write?" and then given like 15 minutes in which to write. We didn't read what we wrote to each other. I don't have many notes after this piece; at least none that make any sense to me.

I had always thought that I'd come back to it and rewrite it, but it just sat there in a folder on a legal pad for four years and yesterday was the first time I'd even re-read it. And I like it just fine.