Love and Freedom

About one month ago, I crept downstairs from my bed around 1:00am.  I was tossing and turning, consumed by an on-going discussion that my husband Adam and I had been having.  The Freedom Festival 2010 was on our minds.  We are founders and co-chairs of this event that benefits The Emancipation Network.  And almost every e-mail and text we sent each other, almost every after dinner clean-up conversation, and almost every late night chat involved the Freedom Festival.  As the weeks crept closer to our mid-August event date, we were ironing out and coordinating the performance line up, sound check slots, ticket sales and giveaways, posters, promotions, product and merchandise sales, volunteers, parking, weather, and finances.  We didn't have a huge budget, we had some pretty serious expenses, and we were filled with worry that people wouldn't turn out.  It's Cape Cod in the summer, the options for activity are limitless and we weren't sure that our event would be given priority in the community's busy schedule.  We soothed ourselves by deciding that folks would either need to love the cause or love music.  And in the quiet of the night, we were terrified with the reality that those conditions probably weren't enough to bring the kind of crowd we deemed worthy.

I paced.  I poured tea.  I checked my email.  What are we doing?  Why is our perfectly full life with five children, a mortgage, a job, friends, family and some local and global volunteering not enough?  Why do we take on projects that require our full attention and commitment?  I needed to be charged, to be reminded, to be reassured.  I knew exactly where I needed to turn.   I pulled out my journal and re-read the entries from my volunteer trip to Kolkata.  I studied my blogs and the blogs of the other volunteers.  I took out my pictures, my treasures, my notes from the girls.  I watched Born into Brothels.  Again.  Several hours later, I found peace.  When I look into the eyes of the world's children, there is no questioning why we do the work we do.  There is only one quiet, clear, honest answer:  Love.

With advance ticket sales quite low, we turn up the heat - radio time on several stations, press releases, free tickets at local tourism spots, social networking onslaught and a fierce street team.  I am reminded of the words TEN Founder Sarah Symons shared with me several years ago when we started fundraising:  "march onward in an effort to bring people together in the name of love, not profit."  Well, at least that's how I remember it (and I hope she meant it!).  Because we do just that.

It is a humble turnout.  A modest profit.  A gorgeous venue.  A divine summer day.  An explosion of passionate art, music, and dance.  I want to count the money.  Instead I focus on the love.  I watch grown men join the African dancers with reckless abandon.  I watch my good friend drum with her children over her adorable pregnant belly.  I watch my parents and in-laws allow the cause to seep into their hearts, because it beats so strongly in mine.  As the sun goes down, mothers and fathers carry, spin and dance with their growing children.  During a live portrait painting of Mother Teresa, I reach for the hand of a friend that joined me in India this winter.  She has my son on her lap.  She squeezes me tight.  We don't need words.  Musicians open their wallets and return what they have been paid.  An unlikely bystander makes the biggest donation of the night.  There are tears, but nothing is sad.  Seeds of inspiration are planted.  Awareness, however simple, has been raised.  The right and perfect people came out in the name of love and it shows. 

In the moonlight, Adam lays in the grass with our daughters and they say a prayer that will reach the "India Girls".  I think of them, their faces, and imagine they are right there with us.  But we are always together, not in the name of money or numbers or profit, but in the name of love and freedom.

Namaste, Janell