Where Freedom Begins

Weekly wisdom to level up your creative life in 3 minutes, for free.

A SHORT STORY

Ten years ago, I published three books of poetry as part of a multi-year initiative called The Real Global Poets. This initiative was a collaborative effort between my non-profit The Great Globe Foundation and Real Life Poets, which aimed to give a voice to youth through poetry in Somalia, Kenya, New York, and Alabama.

The other day, a stranger bought one of the books off of Amazon.

I’m always deeply moved when this happens, as it is seemingly a random event. What prompted that stranger to support our work, I wonder? Were they as moved as I was when they read the students’ words?

It reminds me of a simple story I experienced when working with one of the students—a young man named Ombonya. He had just finished performing his poetry out loud for the first time. I asked him, “How did you feel?” His answer: “I feel free.”

For a young man who felt entrapped by a refugee camp, I was moved by how the act of sharing his voice felt limitless.

As I ponder that freedom today, I wonder about the places that manifest that feeling for me.

Somewhere out there, a stranger holds a book filled with the voices of those young poets—voices that refused to be contained.

I like to think that in reading their words, they too felt a small opening—a reminder that freedom isn’t something given, but something spoken into being.

A POEM

“The Weight of our Living” by Ocean Vuong

the poem, like the fire escape, as feeble and thin as it is, has become my most concentrated architecture of resistance. A place where I can be as honest as I need to—because the fire has already begun in my home, swallowing my most valuable possessions—and even my loved ones. My uncle is gone. I will never know exactly why. But I still have my body and with it these words, hammered into a structure just wide enough to hold the weight of my living. I want to use it to talk about my obsessions and fears, my odd and idiosyncratic joys. I want to leave the party through the window and find my uncle standing on a piece of iron shaped into visible desperation, which must also be (how can it not?) the beginning of visible hope. I want to stay there until the building burns down. I want to love more than death can harm. And I want to tell you this often: That despite being so human and so terrified, here, standing on this unfinished staircase to nowhere and everywhere, surrounded by the cold and starless night—we can live. And we will.

Grateful,

Michael