Different modes for a feeling

Here's a hodgepodge of my favorites.
I can't write tonight, but I want to put something good "out there."...here.
Nina Simone, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, and Frida Kahlo have continually shaped me (my understanding of myself and others, my understanding of a world I can't wrap my head around). I, too, believe that freedom exists for each of us in our own way and that every individual is capable of feeling free. But the concept of freedom is so elusive to me...
I think there's a freedom we generate within ourselves and for others by doing that which breaks us away from the unrelenting tug of war between life and death (time): making, crafting, writing, singing, dancing, working, moving, listening, breathing--doing something for the sake of doing it.
I think there's a feeling of freedom that's realized momentarily when we "give in" to the present in a way that seems as if you know exactly where you are in this great universe and you say in your head "beyond this...well, that's nothing to me," but that just happens. It's like reading a line of poetry that just strikes you or when you happen to catch a child giggling and you can't help but smile. You don't do anything, you're just there.
Regardless of how it manifests, there is no comparable thing. Love leads us there. Friendship, too. Good conversation. Laughter. Poetry made me feel free for a long time. It all leads to a temporary succession from any form of mental, spiritual, emotional, physical binding.
Maybe you write or paint or sing or dance to set yourself free, maybe you do that so others may realize how it feels to be free and then feel the urge to share that feeling you gave them. There's a great amount of labor being done daily, on multiple levels of our society, by women who seek to set themselves, one another, or other people free.
Freedom is a feeling all humans fight for in small, beautiful ways. Here are some catalysts for me (bits of others who move me):




**Start at 1:15**

"And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives. That we not hide behind the mockeries of separations that have been imposed upon us and which so often we accept as our own." ("The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action" -Audre Lorde).

“The function of freedom is to free someone else.” -Toni Morrison


"Roots" by Frida Kahlo (1943) http://www.fridakahlo.org/roots.jsp#prettyPhoto[image1]/0/