After sharing something about my past with a friend, she said, “You’re continuing to air out the fairy tale”.

That reminds me of words from Suzuki Roshi’s book, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind:

“The best way to control people is to encourage them to be mischievous. Then they will be in control in its wider sense. To give your sheep or cow a large, spacious meadow is the way to control him.”

Perhaps that’s why people are risking so much and fighting so hard for their freedom in Ukraine. We want and need the space to be mischievous. We want and need to experiment, discover, and find our own personal ways to fence and control.

We need the space to do so, the permission to decide what opens our own unique gates.