On Freedom
Freedom On
June 2022
“How are you holding up?” Vaimo asks on the phone the day following the US Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade. “I mean, this is part of your life’s work. I’ve just been really thinking about you the last couple of days.” How am I holding up I wonder? Perhaps the only way to really trace the contours of my feelings is a deep grief that I’ve somehow compartmentalized into the pit of my stomach, to be dealt with later? It’s a tough bargain because to do this I know I have to deaden myself to the deep feelings I’ve got brewing inside. And instead they will kind of seep out through the gaps of the container I try to make to hold it. It takes a lot of effort to tamp down emotional responses. I know that it will draw from my banks of psychic and creative energy to do so. But, I’ve made this calculation, I’ve got a lot going on and not a lot of time to fully sit with this decision. I guess I’m grateful this happened while I’m at a weekend-long yoga retreat taking place outdoors in Decorah, Iowa. I’m grateful hermanita is with me. But “holding up” feels like only possible through distraction. I’m not so much grieving this current specific moment, which of course is terrible and will no doubt have real life implications for people I know and so many others I don’t, but I’m really grieving the constant pressure, the insidious backlash against feminism that has shaped my lifetime. I mean, to be clear, who among us with the capability of bringing life into this world could truly sit with the indignities offered us in this so-called nation and not completely break down? Wow, as I’m writing I’m talking myself into the breakdown. Breakdown as resistance, refusal to comply, the reckoning feminists have been calling for since before I was born.
February 2014
Vaimo and I travel with a cohort of women to Cuba as part of a Witness for Peace delegation as our delayed Honeymoon. The trip was organized on women’s issues and given the US relationship to Cuba at the time the only way to visit the country 60 miles south of Florida was to agree that this was an educational trip. What this meant in practice was that for each of the ten days we were on the island we had to engage with a minimum of three educational opportunities. These educational opportunities ranged in delivery and content, though because the trip’s theme was women’s issues, we met with a diverse collection of women who taught us about the double currency economic market, community centers geared toward women’s issues, women’s political participation and artistic production, and how to dance salsa, rumba and mambo to name a few of the wonderful encounters we shared. The sessions were typically organized as sharing between the groups of women. Some of us (me, I really just mean me) spoke in broken Spanish beyond our translators’ interpretation guidance. Other times the information was relayed through our group guides. In the Centro Nacional de Educación Sexual (CENESEX) we gathered with the staff where we learned of the full spectrum of gender specific care the nation provides to the people on the island. Reproductive justice, as in being able to choose when and how to begin a family or not, is baked into the services provided to all, including abortion. They shared with us how transgender folks work with their medical providers to get the therapies necessary for them to thrive in their gender identities. When some of our travel group asked more about the freedom and access to abortion the CENESEX staff asked us, “is it true that in your country some people cannot get abortions?” And through interpreters we tried to explain, that by law yes, anyone could theoretically access abortion services, but that some states make it particularly difficult, some political and religious leaders are trying to make it illegal. And their response was, “But why would you ever go backwards?” I’ve thought about that question, delivered not with judgment, but with deep earnestness a lot over the years since it was posed. Our guides expressed genuine confusion about why are these forces at work like this? There is of course, no logic to explain it. Other than the logics of white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy. Of course our Cuban compatriots could not fathom it, women are named as equal citizens in the Cuban constitution. Can you imagine?
April 2004
Details are fuzzy now, on how I learned about the chartered busses picking up college students from various campuses and converging in Washington D.C. for the March for Women’s Lives, but I along with several of my really wonderfully dear college activist friends were on the bus and we were off on that roughly 17 hour drive toward the monuments and the place where so much of our federal policy gets made. I remember feeling at the time that I was grateful this would be how I came to D.C. for the first time. Taking to the streets among people from all over to demonstrate our commitment to reproductive justice - including access to abortion - in this march on the National Mall. I’m pretty sure we spent more time in the bus round trip than we got to spend in D.C., but it was worth it to be a part of what was described at the time as the largest march on Washington to date (even as the media chose to not extensively cover the gathering). What we all knew implicitly at the time was that just because abortion access was legal on a federal level, there was no guarantee it would always be so. And we saw this from the vantage point of efforts on the state level to make it difficult for people to access the essential services they needed whether this be through implementing arbitrary waiting periods, unnecessary mandated transvaginal ultrasound procedures, forcing abortion providers to be affiliated with a hospital, attempts to institute bans after certain week of pregnancy, outlawing late term abortions, violent threats and actions against abortion clinics, etc. This, of course on top of the very real material burdens for those seeking abortions like how one clinic serves the entirety of South Dakota, North Dakota and much of western Minnesota. What that group of over a million people knew was that these rights weren’t guaranteed. We gathered in Washington to implore our politicians to uphold these constitutional rights to privacy, because as we knew decades ago, there were constant efforts afoot to undo those protections.
August 2016
First day of classes at a regional university in NW Minnesota on the North Dakota border. After the first learning activity and discussion in the 80-person lecture hall filled with excited students, a young white woman approaches me at the lectern. “Am I going to be able to pass this class if I don’t believe in anything you say?” Me smiling, though not with my eyes, “Well, first off, this class isn’t about opinions. Your grade will be determined by how well you demonstrate the understanding of the concepts related to gender as a system that shapes our world, and the impact that system has on all of us.” “Well, what if I believe women are lower than men and should stay that way?” “Like I said, you’re responsible for demonstrating your knowledge of the core concepts.”
I wish I could tell you that student had this amazing learning journey that ended in leaving her oppressive religious conditioning behind. But she didn’t. In the 16-weeks I had twice weekly interactions. I’ve only got to hope that something shifted her and that maybe a major transformation has happened since, or is ahead. It’s difficult to see that possibility especially faced with so much absolute disdain for abortion by family members who also use D&Cs for their health after miscarrying instead of carrying the fetal tissue to term in Arizona. But I see the ease in adhering to a system that makes sense to you because that’s all you know. I know I am in such a state of grief right now because so many instances of the social contract feel (are?) broken. In my estimation the only reason to ever go backward is to get the person lagging behind. To help them on the path toward collective liberation. Not to revisit social progress legislation and laws to overturn them, especially in light of a nation supposedly founded on freedoms. Of course, whose freedoms has always been the question. I’m tired y’all. I’m tired of carrying around the burden of being me in this society. I already have enough anxieties I bring with me every where I go. This newsletter is, has always been, I hope will remain, a practice of my ability to claim freedom. To be free to express, to be free to be in community with others who may be seekers, learners, constantly engaging with others in hopes of finding their way through the complexity. I want to be as free as the dude who carries his AR-15 on his back into a Starbucks, but instead of the gun, I’m donning a queer, pro-abortion, feminist t-shirt. Strike that, I want to feel freedom to just be, not afraid of being shot at a place of business, not afraid of being physically harmed because of the body I’m in or who I love, not afraid of being exactly who I am and how I am. Because I don’t think the dude with the gun feels true freedom if he has to carry the gun to do his business. He too is afraid. We all are. Sure our fears stem from different places but it’s all coming from the same root. I don’t want to be afraid, and I don’t want him to be either.
June 2022
The birds wake me up at 4:30am when the light of the sun begins to crest the horizon. I breathe, I stretch, I calm my mind. I feel where the emotions are moving in my body and I try to send those places some extra love. I purposefully make breakfast with attention and care. I feed the goats and let the chickens out. I breathe in the beauty of trees and prairie and lake life as the loon calls hello to the neighborhood. I make my gratitude list of five things. I head downstairs to my studio to paint. I a living the life I have always dreamed of but didn’t know it. I am holding up.
What I’m Reading
Love and Rage by Lama Rod Owens
I am a believer that books and one’s interaction with books are based on when you’re ready to receive their lessons. That was certainly the case with this book which I purchased probably soon after it hit bookstores though only began reading it following my yoga asana practice this month. With so much grief tied to rage for me, the book has helped provide a framework for the role of anger in one’s life not by simply acknowledging that it is a human emotion but rather in as much as it encourages us to find ways to live with the anger. I am touched by the personal narrative approach in the first part of the book that reveals Lama Rod Owen’s journey to understanding both how to hold his rage and how his rage is perceived as someone who is identified as a Black, gay man. The second aspect of the book are practical guides for creating one’s own space to hold the rage and recognizing how we can transform it. Perhaps what is most wonderfully radical about the practice at all is that Owens believes love and rage can coexist. This is especially meaningful for those of us who are feeling the particular ways that forces beyond our control weigh on our spirits.
Creative Ritual
Two paintings off the easel (painting wall), two in progress with paint, one stretched, one in progress for the stretch (the new staple gun is working fantastic Uncle!). I am in the last phase of painting for this series. Don’t be alarmed if I am MIA for the next month (including a possible break in the newsletter content) because I am barreling toward a deadline and I’ve already cut down to the absolute bare bones so as to prioritize painting and exhibition preparations. Who knows, maybe I’m more together than I think I am, but a lot of work will happen between now and dropping off my paintings at the gallery, and I am honestly not sure how it’s all going to happen. Last week I learned I was the recipient of a Puffin Foundation Grant which will help support my Roots Series exhibition process as the show will travel to a Missouri college after its stint at a nearby gallery. Enough updates from me, back to painting and the grant application I’m working on with the mid-July deadline. As always, here’s a reminder that small works are available for sale at my shop and I’m open to payment plans and trades if you see something you’d really love to live with and for whatever reason cannot pay for it with the typical currency method.
Questions to ponder
How are you holding up?
What are you carrying that you can let go of, if at least for a few moments?
How are you seeking freedom these days?
Where are you most free?
Thanks for journeying with me. I hope, as always, that you take what you need and leave the rest for someone else, or for another time.
-KCF
PS: Moved by my words about the importance of abortion as healthcare services? Support the Red River Women's Clinic fundraiser to relocate from North Dakota across the river to Moorhead, MN so they can continue to provide much needed services for our area. It is a tangible thing you can do today to hold on and hold up. <3