THE ARTS OF LIBERATION

OUR WALK IN THE WORLD

- MARK NEPO

WHEN I WAS YOUNG, freedom seemed the distance I could travel without having to slow down inside. But now, after many sojourns behind the curtain of noise, after many glimpses of what holds us up, after many elusive sightings of God in the unthinking faces of animals and stones, freedom has given way to liberty, which seems now the depths to which I can go within without having to move at all. And there, I have learned that great thinking and feeling bring us to the secret of being, the way great music brings us to the secret of silence.

Though the way is hard, we each make the world anew by seeing it, loving it, and expressing it. Recently, I spoke in the philosophy department at Hope College in Holland, Michigan on the subject: What is Liberal Arts? In essence, I shared that after all these years, after the many ways experience has worn the excuses from my tongue, I remain steadfast in my belief in the arts of liberation. For me, underneath all attempts at education is the question: How do we live together in our time on Earth? And what does it mean to be alive? And what are the deeper skills—the ways of seeing, being, holding, knowing, feeling, and perceiving—that help us through the miraculous and dangerous corridor it is to live a life on Earth?