Outside my childhood home stood a Box Elder tree.  When our father was out farming in the fields, my sister Paula would climb high up into it to avoid doing the dishes.  Dad would have gone up after her but Mom was not a climber.  My younger brothers ventured up before me. I'm afraid of heights.

The first time I "climbed" the tree my brothers put a step ladder against it to help me.  Being brothers, they then took the stepladder away, laughing,  stranding me in the tree.  I yelled and cried until Paula came to rescue me.  

Climbing it looked like so much fun and I have always wanted to overcome my fears.  With some coaching I began to scale the tree myself.  One of the lower branches went nearly horizontal for a while so my brothers and I would sit astride it pretending to be riding one of our horses. That was fun.

Eventually I began climbing higher.  I wanted to see the robin's nest, too - the little blue eggs.  One summer day I climbed higher than ever before.  It's always windy in South Dakota so those branches were moving.  I remember being scared, holding on tight as my heart raced. I looked around.  It was a clear day and I could see forever over the flat land. The clouds puffed, the branches swayed, the leaves dappled.  Fear left me.

Box Elder bugs later attacked the tree and we had to cut it down.  The house is gone now, too.  It was falling apart and had to make way for a new house to shelter my brother Pete (of stepladder fame) and his family.  Even so that day in the grand old tree next to our childhood home is solid in my memory, with its sense of freedom in the conquering of fear.

Years ago I heard that white people tend to think of  freedom as it relates to personal liberty or liberties, but that for African Americans it tends to mean more about the freedoms of all.  On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a meditation on the spectrum of meaning for this word so prized in our society.

On a personal level I am going through things and letting go of any that do not bring me joy and that I don't need going forward. (Please see my other blog on this site "The Tidying Project.) One surprising effect is feeling increasingly free - free of guilt about not using some of my clothes, not reading some of my books.  Each item I thank and let go acknowledges some little truth and makes me a little more free..  Dealing with all my things means completing tasks put on hold but that hang over me. Each completion brings more freedom to do other things, like writing.  

Going through books I discovered little notebooks with ideas for poems, some of which I never wrote.  As I was entering one of these drafts, freedom came up in a way that surprised me.

Labyrinth Walk
By Tess Baumberger

Today’s insight is about accepting turnings,
Changes of direction this subtle path requires.
Trusting each to bring me to the center of it all
At which point I might look back, discern a pattern.

How many walked serenely towards destruction,
Injustice, spiraling toward acts of evil,
thinking they had to accept each turn as fate?
The stones that mark the way blur in the shadows.

I stop. Leaves skitter across the labyrinth.
Light and pushed by the wind, they have no choice.
The wan autumn sun slants across the sky.
I walk across the pathways to a destination of my own.
***
This poem bridges the notion of personal freedom with the wider freedom that comes from justice.  Of course the two are related, perhaps through the kind of agency expressed in this poem. When we choose not to accept larger movements that restrict our own freedom or that of others, when we choose to act to counter those trends toward injustice, then we begin to move beyond our individual liberty to collective freedom.  This reminds me of another poem I wrote years ago, in honor of Martin Luther King Jr.
​

Standing
In honor of Martin Luther King, Jr.
By Tess Baumberger
When a black man rose
to teach me of tolerance
and treating respectfully
all my brothers and sisters,
I stood with him 
flushed with rage
at those who can not,
will not, do not,
see as equal
all other people.

He freed my feet
and as I walked
shoulder to shoulder
with hallowed humanity
that hot holy ruby
rose again to my face,
coloring my voice to proclaim
the rights of every one,
the challenge of democracy,
the claims of freedom,
and the tasks of true liberty,
which will not sit with us all
until it stands for us each.

***
Reading this now I can see that rage may work against treating all respectfully.  Howard Thurman wrote about that in an essay on hate.  He wrote about the hate of the oppressor which limits the freedom of the oppressed, and also about the hatred of the oppressed toward the oppressor.  He says that while hate can motivate us to act for justice, in the end it is a destructive force that can burn the heart of those who hate whoever they hate.  Hate limits freedom.  Perhaps this is why those who were once oppressed sometimes turn and act to oppress others.  The cycle of hate then continues - unless we can together break free from it.

One last poem, another I discovered in one of those small notebooks.

Employment of Joy
By Tess Baumberger

There is so much to do.
Let us go in freedom, singing, to the fields
To bend our backs to the labor before us
Using tools shaped to our hand.
Scent of the earth rising towards us
Glory of sun shining about us
Trees dancing in birdsong and breeze.
When we join our voices with that chorus
​The work we share is the employment of joy.

***
​May it be so.