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Freeing

“When Michelangelo was a little boy, one of his friends gave him a small Greek sculpture of a human form, half chiseled from marble.  For the rest of his life, Michelangelo kept that little statue by his bed.  It was the last thins he saw before he went to sleep, the first thing he saw when he awoke.  For him it became a symbol of man’s anguished effort to be liberated from the prison of his own ignorance.  Michelangelo devoted his whole life to freeing figures from stone. Sometimes it would take him months, even years.  Always he began with a vision of the man or woman locked up in the stone.  He said, “It is my job, my task, to set that man, that woman, free.”  Such was the inspiration that great man – and, indeed such was the inspiration of the great movement, of which he was an exemplar – the Renaissance, as we call it today.”  -George Ross, “Let Us Live Before We Die”

We have a dual responsibly- to free both ourselves from the bindings that imprison us and free others from their anguish

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