Betsy was my childhood sweetheart, and perhaps I was hers. We never talked about that amongst all the things that we never talked about. Given some stress, five kids, and a cadre of local disaffected high school students hanging around our house, what did we do? Bring in another kid to pull ourselves back together again with a common cause. A vasectomy and the threat of varicose veins dictated against breeding another of our own. So we entered the justice system to bring home a foster child.

Runaway and truant, dressed in juvenile detention grays—that’s how we met 14-year-old Falicia. Her brother Bill lived with us from time to time as well, also a runaway and frequent truant. Why in the hell we believed that these two would re-glue a faltering marriage is a bit of a mystery to me now. At the time I think we believed that facing a difficult challenge together would force us to set aside differences. Unfortunately, our largest differences were our beliefs about children and parenting.

And about freedom. Not from marriage necessarily, or from family, since George relies on both family and his community as grounding elements, but a freedom from ideologies and rules. Even among so many of the present-day million(billion)aires in Aspen, there are expectations placed upon them by their peers – to buy a table at this organization’s benefit, to attend that cocktail party, to invest in this fund – which they oddly conform to. They miss the point altogether of having great wealth – that its greatest gift is the freedom to discover themselves and the world. George once told me that he can get along with anyone, except for the rich.

Freedom comes with the realization that one is doing it, that one is indeed able to do it. Freedom to act is not the freedom, the act itself constitutes the freedom. Freedom is breaking the silence, the silent acquiescence to what is.

Falicia (now spelled Felicia and a single mother of two) is not the only child that George has helped to raise besides the six that carry his name (five from his first wife Betsy, and one adopted son with his wife Patti). There are also his stepdaughter Arleigh from his brief second marriage (“The second wife blew into my life within months of my divorce. It’s something we just say: Jesus Christ, everybody should be committed one terrible mistake, and that was mine.”), and Juliana.

Juliana was born to an established, wealthy Aspen family. Her birth mother, “N”, was once a classmate of George’s son Patrick at the Aspen Community School where George was the principal. N was a “racer chaser,” mentally unstable and very promiscuous; she “never fell in love with her baby,” whose paternity remains a suspicion, and could never handle the responsibilities of parenthood. When Juliana was just an infant, N took a taxi to a Manhattan New Year’s party, and left Juliana with the taxi driver while she celebrated.

Freedom requires obstacles, obstructions, and thoughtlessness. And the innocence is about the attitude towards those obstacles and obstructions. The obstacles are thought about, cared about, feared even, but with an innocent lack of concern, almost an indifference.

Eventually, when Juliana was eleven years old, void of any semblance of a loving relationship with N who had left town once again, her grandmother, without warning, called the authorities to place Juliana in a foster home. The authorities sentenced N to a year of intense parenting classes while Juliana lived in a foster home. When N regained custody of Juliana, she approached George and Patti to take Juliana into their home. With their son Ben around the same age as Juliana, the couple had mixed feelings: Patti yearned for a daughter, while George, at 66 years old, was hesitant. They turned to Ben to make the final decision, and he said yes, that he wanted to have a sister.

Freedom and innocence; innocence and freedom, there is a relationship and it is my business now to uncover some hints of what this is. Does one engender the other and the other engenders the one, sometimes but not always? My mind is stuck on the idea that there are experiences that combine those two primary concepts together in a powerful way. Experiences which one enters into in innocence and finds freedom, the two states melding, fusing into a special state of the spirit, a state which as yet has no name.

“Juliana is truly my daughter and I am her father. It took years,” he says. “All she knew about adult men was that they wanted to get into her pants. It took awhile to make a transference to me that’s not that. Think about how you feel about older men if that’s all they want? You don’t trust them. You don’t like them, and you wish they’d go away…At first, she really decided that she needed to be the one to open the conversation. And she started with, ‘Do you like the color of this house?’ And then she asked, ‘Do you like the color of that house?’ She was actually asking me questions about a beautiful thing, and that’s how it began. And I think I was right in being patient and just letting it, you know, don’t push it, don’t push the river.”

I believe that there are many other experiences that bring together innocence and freedom. I have asked many people to help me, to talk to me, about their own experiences. I have asked, for example, a monk and a mother in her first pregnancy, and have heard back, “Oh, yes.” This has not helped me find words but has convinced me that my innocence/freedom obsession thing is onto something.

George’s circular argument for freedom’s relationship to innocence derives from his drive to stay close to and nurture the beauty of innocence, expressly through the eyes of children.

An innocent: A simple, guileless, inexperienced, or unsophisticated person; who finds freedom, the condition of being free of restraints in the effort it takes to stay aloft, to overcome the barriers.

He has created a state of freedom in his own life that has allowed for this nearness, which has fueled his dedication to overcoming the barriers through democracy and social justice and, most recently, social entrepreneurship.

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