What it takes to be free and why you need a refugium

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We spend our lives trying to find our power and our freedom. It is not easy: We live in a culture that has distorted the meaning and measure of power, confusing visibility with value, status with substance, attention with love; we live in a universe where free will may be an illusion, where chance deals the vast majority of the cards — the family and epoch we are born into, the body and biochemistry we live in, the people we cross paths with, the accidents of chemistry and happenstance we call love. The great double-edged question is how to keep power from becoming a prison and how much freedom we can find between the narrow parameters of our givens. But somewhere deep down, in the marrow of our language, we seem to know: The word power shares its Middle Latin root with possibility — its only measure is that which liberates the possible in us; our only power is our freedom.

Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print and as stationery cards.

“Nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom,” James Baldwin wrote. It is unbearable largely because it demands a shedding of the self with all of its attachments — to ways of being, to ideas about how the world ought to be, to particular interpretations of reality. Such attachments are shackles best broken by what Irish Murdoch has so splendidly termed unselfing, key to each of the five kinds of freedom she identified in literature and life. For Murdoch, freedom takes radical unsefling — only then are we truly free to both be ourselves and love each other:

Freedom is exercised in the confrontation by each other, in the context of an infinitely extensible work of imaginative understanding, of two irreducibly dissimilar individuals. Love is the imaginative recognition of, that is respect for, this otherness.

This is why, for Octavio Paz — who thought deeply about freedom — love is “a knot made of two intertwined freedoms.” And if love is our fulcrum of belonging, then belonging itself is woven of the same paradox — something Maya Angelou articulates in one of her finest interviews:

You only are free when you realize you belong no place — you belong every place — no place at all.

Art by Ofra Amit for The Dark Wood of the Golden Birds by Margaret Wise Brown

In this sense, freedom is the hinge between being and belonging that swings open the door to being ourselves — which, yet again paradoxically, must include the freedom to change, to confront the illusory solidity of the self, its ceaseless mutability. Psychoanalyst Karen Horney formulates this perfectly in her pioneering work on the fundaments of personal growth:

We do not need an inner strait jacket with which to shackle our spontaneity, nor the whip of inner dictates to drive us to perfection. There is no doubt that such disciplinary methods can succeed in suppressing undesirable factors, but there is also no doubt that they are injurious to our growth. We do not need them because we see a better possibility of dealing with destructive forces in ourselves: that of actually outgrowing them. The way toward this goal is an ever increasing awareness and understanding of ourselves. Self-knowledge, then, is not an aim in itself, but a means of liberating the forces of spontaneous growth… And as we lose the neurotic obsession with self, as we become free to grow ourselves, we also free ourselves to love and to feel concern for other people.

Then, and only then, can we contact the soul beneath the self, which is the only real locus of our freedom. Vassily Grossman — who spent a thousand days as a correspondent on the frontlines of the Holocaust — captures this beautifully in a passage from his almost unbearably poignant reckoning with life and death:

What constitutes the freedom, the soul of an individual life, is its uniqueness. The reflection of the universe in someone’s consciousness is the foundation of his or her power, but life only becomes happiness, is only endowed with freedom and meaning when someone exists as a whole world that has never been repeated in all eternity. Only then can they experience the joy of freedom and kindness, finding in others what they have already found in themselves.

Children know the deepest truths about life, the elemental knowledge we unlearn in the act of living, those inarticulable truths music alone helps us remember. To hear children sing the secret wisdom of the heart is to be in the presence of something truer and more transcendent than any of our poems and postulates can touch — the ultimate affirmation of our aliveness, emanating Richard Powers’s beautiful and bittersweet assertion that “the use of music is to remind us how short a time we have a body.”

To celebrate twenty years of The Marginalian, composer extraordinaire Paola Prestini set six of her favorite bird divinations to music, which the Young People’s Chorus of New York City brought to life with their commanding innocence and their tender power. Paola’s perfect title for the piece, drawn from one of the cards, captures what every child is when this world is worth of its children: “Meteor of Joy.”

Couple with another choir of young people accompanying David Byrne’s anthem of faith in life, “One Fine Day,” then revisit the story and process behind these bird divinations.

For courage, says Bulgarian folk wisdom instructs, keep a horse chestnut in your pocket.

Even as a child, I was mistrustful of superstition. But every autumn, I would pick up dozens of them from the sidewalks of Sofia and fill my pockets — not as a spell against fear but as an ode to joy. Conkers, as the English call them, spun me up in delight — shiny as mahogany, smooth as river stones, tiny planets from some other universe, the wonder-smitten eyes of some prehistoric creature.

I didn’t know then that they are emblems of life’s irrepressible insistence on itself — miniature monuments to the stubborn creativity of survival.

Illustration from Die Baume und Straucher des Waldes by by Gustav Hempel and Karl Wilhelm, 1889.

Three million years ago, as the Ice Age was beginning to sink its cool blue fangs into the warm body of Earth, the widespread horse chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) began dying off, until only a small population remained, most of it sheltered in the gorges of Bulgaria’s mountains. There, in their sanctum of stone, the trees found themselves unable to attract pollinators during the slender three-week window of their flowering.

This is the story of life — innovate or die: The horse chestnut evolved enormous white flower spikes with pink tips and a chemical hack to block the oxidation of polyphenols in the petal, which turns each flower brown and sheds it after pollination. For three whole weeks, the horse chestnut remains a bride in a gown of amazement, its crown an aria of perfect white blossoms that no bee can resist, all because there was a safe place in which to experiment with the possible.

Illustration from American Medicinal Plants by Charles Frederick Millspaugh, 1887.

That place, I learn from my poet friend Hannah Fries’s absolutely wonderful book A Forest Language, is called refugium. Hannah writes:

When glaciers last crept down from the Arctic, 20,000 years ago, there were places where the icy fingers didn’t reach — mountaintops, hot springs, lowlands beyond the ice. There were pockets of green where things crawled and slithered and ate and mated, protected places where life went on, and from which life set forth again as the ice receded. Refugia.

[…]

The gift of a refugium is time. It holds in its small cup of safety a promise for a new world to come. And it lends out to the living all the years, centuries, millennia it might take to finally find that world.

Even in easier times, it is wise to tend the refuge. What is Earth, after all, but a momentary refugium in the inhospitable blackness of space? From a vantage point far beyond our grasping glows the blue-green dot, a brief and luminous memory in the mind of the universe.

It is the memory of a place where a simple cell had the ambition to harness the energy of a star, and from it, the green wonder of leaves, the trunks rising up, bursting and blooming into the sky — all of life in the sweet, cool shade below.

We too need them, these refugia that shelter us, that save us in the ice ages of life. Whatever your refugium may be — a place, a person, a practice, a poem — it is worth tending to with all the might and all the means you have.

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