In a time of bargain hunting, discount vouchers and telecommunication price wars and promises of FREE Talk - Are we really claiming, exercising and expressing our essential human freedoms?
FREE – a blank cheque for all.
(First print publication: SHE Caribbean 2010)
“FREE” can only be written about freely.
Planting its word seed to gestate in my mind and heart I jotted thoughts and images that sprouted:
“FREE” - African slaves; rebellious teenage; carefree versus careless; natural hair; body water flowing into lover’s crevices; sun kissing SPF-free skin; go barefoot; go naked; chores undone; succumbing to afternoon siestas; breast milk.....
“FREE” - Exists to lend its fruitfulness to free-dom - something only men have. What -dom? King-dom. Why not Queen-dom? Because I never knew I was free; worry-free, money-free, sexually free. Carnival here and there is our cultural expression of “FREE”; this idea of FREE is a high price to pay then for sacred sexuality spilled about.
“FREE” - Land of the “FREE” and brave; places we call “Away”, their borders are closed to me. I am missing “FREE” - free to feel safe that my locked door will stay shut until I alone turn the key.
“FREE” - uninterrupted; the opposite of marriage; jail break from promises that seduce the sun to trade her sky for the sparkly ceiling of domestic baubles; like a tiger who trades the wild for a bowl of milk. The opposite of lonely, companionless Singledom; free to hug and kiss, a listener as long, slow and as deep as...I am.
Mandela was free, in a cell.
“FREE” - Being happy when there is no external evidence that you could or should be.
Heaven. Bliss. Acceptance that neither adds nor subtracts a thing; Free to laugh like a wajang, dance like a nerd; to mismatch colours.
“FREE” – is it always immersed in ‘against’ something or someone? Free from rebellion and status quo, from the duality of justice and injustice too then; not just the opposite of conformity, something else altogether.
“FREE” – not enslaved by perfectionism. Could I experience a sense of Self so freely, so as to qualify to say something useful about our deepest human longing? Freedom is deeper, more expansive and dutiful than love because true Love must find her foundation in being free. Make do then, with snippets and glimpses in this breath, that thought, a word here, a moment there.
“FREE” – my child, until I shroud him with fearful opposites. “Look Justice, my son! It is raining. See Heaven pours out freely on all creatures great and small, all people fat and tall?” He looks out the window, thoughts wandering freely, deeply. Childhood shimmers in original innocence, warming the adult into enlightenment. I see he grows tall but shrinks inwardly under inherited parental laws. Until, choosing freely, he will steep himself in enough earth-shit to grow a decent lifetime of psychological stuff to work through. Life’s messiness is priceless, fertile manure - a pure, free must.
“FREE” will. I relish exercising mine robustly. None will escape the consequences of Love that loves so freely. Mother trusts her Creation so deeply, she can and does let it go into the absolute care of free will. Her offspring has no choice. Each will essentially and eventually return, inevitably.
“FREE” – Eternally. We are never extinguished, though ever clouded here on transitory planes.
And so I come to it - Trust, Love and Freedom are interdependent, and One.
The seeds planted, blossom fully.
Life has authored me only to stumble upon someone else’s perfect sentence: “______” is claimed, not assigned.
You are FREE to fill in the blank.
