Imagining Freedom

Moore 7 Barbara Moore Imagining Freedom It's too bad one has to imagine it. And it's impossible of course, to imagine something one has never seen. But I know what it's like, freedom. It's like a mountain village called Casares where I have never been. But I have a photograph of it on my deska tiny white village strewn down the reddish rock of an impossibly old mountain in Spain. Like an outcropping of the mountain itself, pressed that hard into the earth by a sky of such solid light that the mountain has to press back again. I look at the snapshot often, aware of something I can't quite see, the light in the picture is so intense. It's there, nevertheless. A shadow. And I think it's the sense of days and days spent in a place I can't really love. As if the wrong rock, black, vitreous, volcanic, had deposited itself in my chest, and I couldn't press back hard enough to dislodge it. Maybe so, I let it stay. Every mountain must have absorbed a piece of bad rock in its day. The early days, turbulent days of its making, which is still there like a splinter that no longer hurts. Become part 8 the minnesota review of the complex heart it's embedded in. When you're not busy doing something else, think of Casares. It's porous, half-demolished walls where as many birds live as people. Where centuries of living, which are also suffering, have soaked into the stones and ceased to be suffering. Become weeds and goats and sun without stint pouring through the crooked houses, holding them up. That's freedom, to outlast yourself and find yourself still there, only happier, cemented by an ancient light that knows a lot more than you do. Knocking at a small wooden door in the Costa del Sol, entering while you're still knocking. ...