Lifeways [antikvár]

vu INTRODUCTION John Davy This book is about children, about family life, about being a parent. But most of all it is about freedom. For generations, innumerable parents must have felt tensions between personal fulfilment and domestic obligation. But the search for libera-ration is now more conscious and more acute—so much so that many women have come to regard their homes as prisons and their children as jailors. Modern families are no longer naturally sustained by tradition or by their surroundings. Rapid change has set religion afloat, and leaves many personal relationships in tatters. It is possible to be very liberated and absolutely adrift. Or outwardly dutiful and inwardly in despair. But however we rearrange our lives, we are still limited by our surroundings, and more significantly, by ourselves, by those unfree-doms which we carry around with us; they are our real jailors : disinterest habit, discouragement, suffocate the soul. But wonder, reverence, creativity can open doors. In the end, therefore, liberation must be an inner question, a search for a quality of life which cannot be arranged, but only discovered and lived. Although freedom is our own problem and our own search, we don't have to seek it alone. This book has its origins among women (and men) who met over a period of years in a Sussex village. Some were permanent residents, others were students, or wives or husbands of