Free To Be

Do you remember that feeling you had on the first day of summer vacation when you were a kid and had been sitting in a hot room with a slow fan while beautiful June weather was just outside the window? School’s out for summer! My sense of freedom comes from those lazy days and weeks when you just sort of drifted from place to place, spending time outside all day and night. Wandering around barefoot, without a care in the world. The first day of summer makes me think about being free and feeling free and how freedom has manifested in my life.

In the early years as a stay-at-home mom, I had such mixed feelings about summer. I wanted my kids to have the same great summer experiences that I did. But it turned out that that is difficult to do in our modern world, kids are not free like they used to be. So I would sign my kids up for summer programs and lessons but would then just wind up driving around and around our town dropping them off and picking them up. My husband went to sleep away camp and loved it, so eventually we started sending them to Camp Sangamon in Vermont, a kid’s paradise if I ever saw one, which gives kids a true sense of freedom The best part of the camp is that they have a strict no phones policy, which gave kids a taste of a phone-fee lifestyle, and parents a chance to stop paying so much attention to their kids and a little more attention to themselves.

Being a stay-at-home mom can be both liberating and restricting. On the one hand, you can spend your days pretty much as you like, on the other hand the reason you don’t have to go to the office is these small people who basically need your attention every waking moment. So that can restrict your physical freedom but it also has a tremendous effect on your intellectual freedom. Anyone who has had to care for young children knows what I’m talking about, the impact of being constantly interrupted. I don’t think I could have done this writing earlier in my life because I didn’t have the discipline. But almost 20 years of intensive mothering forced me to develop the discipline necessary to care for children and get other things accomplished. Now I finally have uninterrupted time to follow a train of thought to its conclusion and the discipline to do hard things.

Then there’s the liberation that occurs when you finally stop caring about people’s opinions about you, which may be one of the bonuses that comes in middle age. In order to be true to my creative spirit I have to really not care what people think about my work, positive or negative. Obviously I am human and I feel good when people like my work and bad when they don’t. But it is essential to the independent spirit of creativity to not think about that when you are creating your work. I have often thought about the aboriginal societies that forbid the recording of images and film because they believe the images capture their souls. Deep down I believe my paintings contain a piece of my soul and that that deep exposure is what makes it difficult to paint and to show others my paintings. My paintings are my babies but more accurate perhaps it is a kind of parthogenesis, what I am giving birth to through my work is myself. And as my work teaches me about myself. I am completed by it.

One of the first things I thought about when I started working on this piece was the old children’s album Free to Be, You and Me. I had the album and the book when I was 5 and loved it When my oldest was around the same age I bought the CD to play for him and the first time I listened to it I cried. It seemed like such an innocent wish and childhood belief that everyone was free to be completely themselves. Free to be yourself, just who you are, warts and all, loved unconditionally, a world where you don’t have to pretend to be different. What does a society like that look like? As a child, Native American cultures epitomized this ideal culture, even though my source for this was a bit dodgy, the movie Little Big Man.

In their fascinating book, The Dawn of Everything, the authors David Graeber and David Wengrow explore the connection between equality and freedom and trace back through history the origin of the modern concept of freedom. In order to do so they researched and documented how the Native American cultures of the 17th century were the true source of the concepts of freedom and equality that the French and American revolutions would fight to achieve. Apparently, the Native Americans at that time thought the Europeans were fools and “no better than slaves”. Grabber and Wengrow’s premise is that the Native American culture was basically designed to ensure that no one person could dominate others. In addition, they posit that “In the American view, the freedom the individual was assumed to be premised on a certain level of baseline communism, since people who are starving or lack adequate clothes or shelter in a snowstorm are not really free to do much of anything other than what it takes to stay alive.”

Is the road to a truly free society universal basic income? If everyone is given a basic income, food, shelter, health care, and education, what interesting things might start to happen? You can understand why the powers that be don’t like it: if people aren’t hungry, if their children aren’t suffering, than how do you control them, make them work to your benefit? I imagine that gradually the security of having all our basic needs met will create both a deep sense of freedom and kindness and generosity towards others, because the man eat man world will have ceased to exist. It may all sound very pie in the sky but maybe that’s because we have been taught to distrust others. Maybe one of the greatest challenges for bringing about this kinder, gentler world is for us to imagine, a world where everyone is healthy, both physically and psychologically. Maybe it would seem anarchic to us, with our old-fashioned morals and worldview, but I believe that embracing the chaos of abundance will reveal its underlying order.