On Freedom, and Flowers

by mariebarry

I have been thinking a great deal about freedom, and about the movement of peaceful people, and about what gentle tide brought me to this shore. The news is full of inflammation. I imagine my life if news is reality. Imagine the lives of all those who have passed through this world in the way the text tells. Take a moment of silence in my heart for a stranger. Think back to the people I never met. Wonder if I am dwelling in the land of dreams. Wake past midnight and realize the stars have changed their station.

Freedom is only as good as the person practicing it. Freedom leaves us like a lonely orphan caught up in a hurricane. Freedom is the giant abyss that we stand at the edge of, calling its name eagerly and waiting an eternity for the echo. I stare into the abyss, or I stare into the memory of staring into the abyss. The skin peels off my lip from the cold winter and I taste the blood in my mouth. I have met some refugees here.

The foreigner exercises infinite groundless freedom. I do not understand the question. I have no history. No first loves live down the lane. No grade school teachers shop at the market. No ghosts have ever seen me passing through this place before. I have never tasted this fruit called Heaven’s date until now.

Freedom is only as good as the artist practicing it. I second guess my intuition. Wonder if my artistic license is valid outside my homeland. Try to hold in balance all I have learned from the two worlds I have known. Reevaluate things people have tried to teach me. Reject some. Cringe when I do not accept more.

My heart changed on a day of synchronization. The fever of foreignness passed. The day came in the form of a series of unfortunate events at the exact moment when I thought I could not bear to attempt to incorrectly draw another tulip. We ruined everything in sight that day. Spilled paint everywhere, broke tiles, filled in colors where emptiness was necessary, ran into doors, generally made ruckus. Together. Then I was healed.

I have been making my own designs. I am copying flowers from books and redesigning the gardens. It feels like moments during my childhood when I visited my grandmother’s house in Virginia. Sometimes I would see a family in their horse and buggy riding down the highway. Her basement was cool and smelled of wood stoves much like the city I am living in now. It was there where I would draw the handmade flower press from the shelf and carefully remove the blotter pages. Sometimes I would uncover someone else’s petals and she would give them to me. I would put them into my compositions without ever feeling I was renouncing my freedom. I never even knew then that the world or a law or a gift or a hostility could limit my freedom.

The imagination is the kite that escapes the hand of the world and goes floating toward the membrane that separates our inner spaces from our outer spaces with the white string unraveling for miles behind; it appears to be reaching for the earth, but truly it is moving toward the heavens.

The top tile is the outer world. The world I copied from a book of 15th century plates. The bottom tile is the inner world. The reinterpreted garden, immersed.