Dearest readers,
I recently finished reading an intriguing and thought provoking novel by Celeste Ng, called Little Fires Everywhere. Throughout the story, the author contrasts the life choices of two families. One is a single mother Mia, and her teen-aged daughter, Pearl, who live a nomadic and minimalist lifestyle. The mother is an artist, and they never stay in one spot very long. They own very few possessions. It isn’t until the end of the novel that we find out what inspired this fairly unconventional bohemian lifestyle for Mia and her daughter. I won’t go into the details of the story, which is very interesting and definitely worth reading. The contrasting family into which Mia and Pearl become involved are the Richardsons, who live a stereotypically privileged upper class white American life with their four children in Shaker Heights, Ohio, a town designed to resist change and to embody perfection.
The polarized choices of these families and their interactions bring out the reality that it is simply not so easy to reside entirely in one or the other “box”. The complexities of life and of being human force us to confront change, force us to evolve and to look into our own hearts to find our own truth, which does evolve throughout our lives.
While I personally identify more closely with Mia, being a single mother and an artist as well, the novel forces me to look back over my own life and some of the choices I have made. Some choices locked me into the box of social convention, while others mercifully popped me out of that box.
Human beings are creators by nature. I believe that it is freedom and flow that draw our hearts, while our egos seek security and the comfort of the known. We are all drawn into this dance when we face adulthood and the responsibilities of taking care of our families. As a single parent with a limited income and no family support, I have had to be very creative to bring abundance and richness of experience into my little family. I know from experience that a creative mind and a connected heart can make wonderful things happen. When we are open to the flow of life, magical connections help us to find the teachers, friends, books, travel arrangements, and whatever it is that we need or desire.
I don’t believe that we should be forced to choose between the two. Since we have all chosen to incarnate in a lower dimensional realm in which we live in physical bodies, our need to sustain those bodies and to keep them housed, healthy, safe, clean is a real need. At the same time, we are all immortal immaterial beings of light whose only true and eternal preoccupation is promoting unconditional love and enjoying our existence as creators and manifestors of realities. Both are real aspects of who we all are.
As an artist and starseed, I have always been aware of my own need for freedom. I’ve never really wanted many material things, and I have never cared about status, promotions, celebrities, marriage, ownership of things. Until I was 32 years old (the age at which I became a mother), I owned almost nothing, and I always worked part-time. Being free to live my life as I chose, to be free to create, to dream, to read, and to enjoy life was my major preoccupation.
Becoming a parent changed my life radically. Suddenly, the 3-D box seemed like something I needed to inhabit in order to give my son what he needed: safety, stability, comfort. A good environment in which he could grow up. Now he is in college in Finland. I feel that this choice has been one that combines the best of both worlds. He is studying tuition-free because of some important choices I made much earlier in life, which have allowed us a greater measure of freedom than most Americans enjoy.
Families in the United States suffocate under a huge burden of debt, and we have almost no freedom to be creative, because all of our time is managed inside of the box. Americans are carefully conditioned since birth to be consumers and to be debtors. Most Americans believe that they live in a free country. This makes me laugh. America is a prison without walls, but with cameras and surveillance everywhere. Basically, most Americans willingly create their own prisons and live within them without even realizing they are not free, and without even realizing what freedom and power are.
As the starseeds guide humanity towards awakening, an increasing number of human beings will begin to remember who we really are and why we are here on planet Earth at this time. The conventional lifestyle and the pursuits of comfort, safety, and status will, in the coming years, diminish significantly in importance as more and more people align their human, 3-D physical self with their higher dimensional soul identities. Once we know that we each create our own reality through the quality and clarity of our thoughts, emotions, and intentions – our consciousness – then living inside of a box will simply become laughable.
Freedom cannot be achieved without truth, and the truth about our nature and abilities as human beings has been concealed from us, as has our true history, for many thousands of years. Until we have transformed our societies to match this truth, we will each have to come to terms with our own truth and our own identity. Throughout our known history, those who were awake and aware were most often persecuted and put to death, because true freedom was always suspicious. Those who usurped our power and who created the hierarchies who run the world today always wanted to make sure that we used our energy to pursue the artificial dreams and goals that they designed for us.
Now is the time to step out from under the giant thumbs of the global financial system, organized religion, government, and the military. We are creators, and we can all live amazing lives. We don’t need to be pulled and polarized. Dare to dream. This is definitely one of the messages transmitted in Celeste Ng’s second novel, Little Fires Everywhere. Be your true self. Even the fanciest box can’t protect you from the power and the design that your soul has created for your life. Mia dares to live her life as she sees fit, and she knows that all of the answers are inside of our own hearts.
adamevenevenadam 