Another Word for Freedom
Last week, I had one of my most significant weeks as a writer and a teacher.
I taught the class, “Writing with Love,” along with June Gervais, at the Omega Institute, and we spent the week exploring and questioning and wondering about the word “love” and what it means to write with love (more to come on this).
The class was born out of a question in Carvell Wallace’s memoir, Another Word for Love. When we asked Carvell what his other word for love was on the Memoir Nation podcast, he said “struggle”—which dramatically shifted my concept of love—and dramatically deepened it.
Despite being the most important word in the human language, love is often used so casually that it becomes thoughtless. It asks for other words. It asks for interpretations and reinterpretations. It asks for thought and reverence and introspection, just as the word “freedom” does.
I’m thinking of this today because we recently interviewed Roxane Gay and Debbie Millman about their re-launch of The Rumpus on the podcast (it drops tomorrow), and, among other things, including Roxanne’s dog, they talked about an ongoing project they just kicked off: What is freedom?
How do we define freedom, they ask, “when a more perfect union is designed for the few and not the many”—when the freedom we celebrate “came at an unbearably high cost for the original stewards of this land.”
The series is formed by responses to that question from their favorite writers, artists, and creative people. Each day in July, The Rumpus will release one of their responses, which might include drawings, short films, poems, stories, or even comics.
They kicked the month off with a response from artist Vincent Valdez, whose provocative work aims “to incite public remembrance and to impede the distorted realities” that surround us every day. “Freedom is learning to recognize and understand the real difference between illusion and the reality of being free,” he says. His drawings are arresting confrontations of that definition.
In pondering love last week, I enlivened the world in a beautiful swirl of meanings and reflections and stories. I look forward to same as I explore freedom. I’m sure those new definitions of freedom will change not only how I approach life, but how I approach writing.
I’m starting with these five words and seeing where they lead me:
Expansiveness: expansiveness is what freedom feels like in the body, the experience of the chest opening, the breath deepening, the sense that the world has more room in it than it did a moment ago.
Emergence: emergence suggests something coming into being that wasn’t there before, a self or a voice or a way of moving through the world.
Wildness: wildness is freedom that refuses to be civilized, organized, or made respectable.
Liberation: liberation implies something to be freed from, which gives it political and emotional weight.
Sovereignty: sovereignty implies not just freedom from external constraint but full ownership of yourself, your story, your decisions. To be sovereign is to be the author of your own life in the most complete sense.
If you want to share how you define freedom, send your responses to hello@therumpus.net.
Feel free also to share your definition in the comments below.
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“The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don't see.”
— James Baldwin
Wine and Storytelling—and More Wine and Storytelling!
Here are three things that are dear to me:
Wine
Stories
Gathering people together to tell stories together.
My friend Elizabeth Rosner and I are going to host an event where you will taste wine and tell stories in new, fun, different, scintillating, sensual ways. We’re teaming with Saintsbury Winery at Jered’s Pottery Studio to host a fundraiser for the ultimate rollicking literary festival in the world—our very own Litquake.
Join us for a night of revelry and revelrying!
In which I talk to Grammar Girl about the nature of memory
Because a photo
I had a therapist years ago who taught me to ask, depending on the situation/feeling I was navigating:
Is it true? If so, it is freedom.
Do I feel free? If so, it is truth.
It's simplistic at first blush, but I've found it has helped guide me to living in integrity, which leads to that expansive feeling you mention. There's more to ponder, but for me, freedom and truth will always be intertwined. (And I mean truth in the Satya sense, not the today is Sunday sense).
I know this will sound like an oxymoron, but I associate freedom with responsibility. This dates back to the days of COVID. I watched as both sides of the quarantine/vaccine/masks issues took harmful actions, in the name of freedom, that infringed on the freedom of others. It didn't sit well with me, and I realized that freedom comes with the great responsibility of not harming or restricting others.