Asking Questions

My friend Ennis Carter has created a woodcut image of a phoenix-rising and is distributing the prints to stimulate discussions on freedom. She refers to her project as prayers. I have been making monoprints that I think of as letters to God. Sweet evidence of synchronicity…my prayers related to hers. However, mine are inarticulate gestures, a hand pouring forth a cry, a deep sadness perhaps, a questioning. I was thinking this morning that I needed to find words as well as gestures so that my prints made more sense. Ennis asks us what freedom means. My first thoughts are "nots" : freedom is not the freedom to spread the fake and the false as truth...not the freedom to denigrate our fellow human beings...not the freedom to take messages out of context and misuse honest communication intentionally, but the freedom to live without fear of false arrests or skin color, or lost health insurance or lost home...the freedom to love whomever one chooses and have the same rights to marriage under the law as others, the freedom of gender and racial equality, the freedom from religious control, the freedom to move freely and proudly around the world, the freedom to express oneself without creating harm for others. It is clear to me that I believe in limiting freedom very carefully…no crying fire in a crowded theater or treating corporations with individual speech rights or passing along false information on the internet. Our minds have such amazing capabilities. Why do some people crave to think and to learn and others do not? We are given a life. Full of potential. What does this all mean?