And We Were Free

They called us a cult. That’s what FOX said, and CNN too. The local channels got a little more personal and accused us of abduction, brain washing, and a variety of other practices we would abhor. We were not a cult, at least as far as our understanding of the word goes. We would call ourselves simply a group of like-minded individuals. We did not follow stars. We did not drink tainted cool-aid and carry around a hit-list. We simply loved the same things and hated the same things and wanted the same things.
We hated celebrities.
We hated school.
We hated buildings and light switches and rules and pundits and scrunchies and toy poodles.
We loved the ocean.
We loved the sky.
We loved poetry and God and acoustic guitars and calluses and sharks and salt in our hair and the stars at night.
We wanted to live simply for these things. We wanted to love, and society hated this, because we hated society. We aren’t new. We are ancient, more ancient than law and society. We were created in the Garden of Eden and made to wander. Temptation is inherent to society and society drove us from union with nature. So we turned our backs on society. We roamed and we rambled. We dropped out of school. We quit our jobs. We sold our homes, and we followed God. We watched Him in the wind stirring the birch trees. We heard His voice in the steady patter of rain. We felt Him in the hardness of stone and the tender shoots of new, spring grass. We loved and we saw love every day. We were imperfect and sometimes we saw hate. This world is imperfect and sometimes we saw death. But it was all beautiful because we were free.
One day we stood upon a mountain side and climbed its jagged face. Clutching its stony wrinkles in our fingers, we slipped and stole across the cliffs and ravines. We looked into the misty valley then towards the clarity of the sun overhead. And all the while we did not see the men coming from the north. We did not see them because they stood in the mist and we trekked above in the light of the sun. We did not see them because we did not expect to find masses amassed against us. The sun shone in our eyes and suddenly we stood in the shadows of the forest and we walked slowly onward under the shifting and shuddering light sifting through the narrow fingers of the pines which swayed slowly about us. We were walking into their trap.
Before we could react there was a battalion of men around us. Some wore uniforms, others the plaids and fatigues of hunters and mountain men. They shouted and brandished diverse weapons in our directions. A rifle spoke first. It demanded something, a boy. Sure there were children with us. Some of us had been children years ago when we began this aimless pilgrimage. Some of us were born on this endless, wandering trail. Some of us had joined recently and were very young. Others were very old. We didn’t care. We let all stand among us. We turned none away. Neither past, nor present, nor future, nor height, nor depth kept any from entering should they desire a place in our midst.
A pitchfork shouted belligerently, and tore through our midst. It pushed and it bruised and it battered and it found its mark.
One of us was dragged away into their midst and a woman wrapped stained, bruised, striped arms around his neck. He coughed. Her bleak, bleary eyes moved not while her mouth sobbed.
We loved him and we wept openly. One of us rushed forward to save the child and struck out at a police man. We pulled her back and she wept. The officer tore her away and chained her wrists. The brother and sister were dragged away. A mocking mother clutched at the boy and slapped the girl, shouting cruelties and abuses. This mother saw a young woman who had brain washed the sports star, a strange new-age hippy who had deprived this young man of his potential. We saw a sister who had torn her brother from abuse, from oppression, from hate, from judgment.
We wept for them both and ran down the mountain. We followed and stood at the town’s borders while he was locked into a home with smoke-stained walls and she was chained in the law’s festering bowels. There we stood, upon the threshold. The River Styx lay before us and it was called South Main Street. A semi rumbled and puffed past us, transporting a legion of plasma TV’s. Its exhaust swirled around us and filled our nostrils with the scent of sulfur and cyanide. We coughed and we screamed and we cried to the skies. We prayed that the trees would tear down this wretched town that the bars of steel and the doors of wood would be rent asunder by the resurrecting waters of the flood.
We begged the town’s people to return these innocents to us. We begged them to release them and to let them follow their paths as they would. We asked them what crimes they could be held for, what law could hold such as them in that dreadful abyss. None could answer us. None could be bothered to speak to such as us. The first night came and we found that some of our own had stolen away in the night. They had left their weather-beaten clothes upon the ground where they had slept. Their books and their instruments and their hope lay, abandoned in the dust. We cried for them. The second night came and saw more leave. And so the third night came and very few of us still stood upon that road side, holding the various gifts of our fallen brothers and sisters. And we wept for them and we wept for the children and we wept for the night whose stars were obscured by the street lights, theater marquees, and bar neon. But the sun rose and we began to lose hope and we began to look to the mountain which would hide us from our enemies.
We began to ascend the slope and we began to see the wind-washed sky, when out of the smog and fume sprang two of the most beautiful, shining faces we had ever seen. The children spun and danced and together we all laughed and sang and ran into the forest and across the babbling brook and found the shining mountain top which sustained us. The girl she sang and the boy he played. The sun smiled down on us and a happy rain touched our smiling lips. It washed the bloody dust from our hands. It cleansed our lungs. It washed the soot and the tears from our eyes. We were clean again and we grasped each other’s hands and we kissed the breezes which lifted our souls.
The purple mountains sang with the clouds. The seas, they roared. The prairie grasses hummed a simple tune. It was all so beautiful. We sighed, for we were free, free again. So slowly we walked over the mountains, over the dunes, over the seas, listening with ready ears for those thunderous voices and those golden trumpets. We listened and our hearts were gladdened and we were free.