Inner Paradise

But the monks of the Middle Ages, and the clerics too, believed that the inner paradise was the ultimate groud of freedom in man's heart. To find it one had to travel, as Augustine had said, not with steps, but with yearnings. ...Paradise is simply the person, the self, but the radical self in its uninhibited freedom. 
-- Thomas Merton, Love and Living.

True freedom is openness, availability, the capacity for the gift.