Spring                                                Full Bee Hiving Moon

It is never safe to speak and act for freedom in an unfree place.  How many have learned that lesson?  American revolutionaries.  French.  East Indian. American Indian.  The South African blacks.  The list could go on and on.  Spartacus.  Socrates.  Even Jesus.  It is never safe to be unfree.  That’s the paradox, the motivator.

And freedom will have its way.  History, though I know the arguments against this position, is on the side of freedom.  It is an ache in the human heart that never goes away until satisfied. Ask the African-Americans or undocumented folks in the USA today.  Ask the Muslims in France or the Turks in Germany, the Romany especially in the Slavic countries.  Ask the Jews of the diaspora anywhere.

To stand on the side of freedom is to stand with the future and against the past.  Each of us takes a position every day, with every purchase we make, every political decision we try or fail to try to influence, every value we pass on through our behaviors and our teaching.  To live is to choose.  Always.

I spoke with a man today about the political environment for working against climate change, for healthy and sustainable forests, agriculture, cities.  The political winds today blow against us.  Is that a reason to sit down and wait them out?  No.  It is a time to stand up, to find the actions we can take that will move us toward a more just and verdant world

One of those actions, always, is to work on the side of freedom.  Ai Weiwei and others held in China today need and deserve our help.  Not as an action against China, but as one for it.  For a world where political speech and action has a place of honor, not a jail cell.