We know freedom through the emotions and actions it ignites in us: joy, exhilaration, confidence, self-expression, playfulness. Yet, we cannot truly know freedom without some sense of belonging, which also ignites these same emotions and actions. Discourses that pit community against individual freedom have it wrong. Freedom and community are deeply intertwined. Tension between the two is like Nature’s checks and balances on rogue individualism and oppressive groupthink. The sweet spot is in the push and pull, where both individuals and communities continue to grow and adapt.
Consider the Wendat (Huron), a group of Iroquoian people who in the seventeenth century lived in Northeastern North America. They have been credited with sparking the imaginations of Jesuit missionaries concerning what a free society might look like, hence facilitating the Enlightenment. At first, the missionaries attempted to convert the Wendat to Christianity, until begrudgingly, they acknowledged the Wendat were quite civilized despite their rustic lifestyles (Huron is French for “rustic”). Not only were the Wendat capable of reasoning and showed superior intellect, but they also lived relatively peaceful lives despite lacking laws. No one had much power over anyone else, and resources were shared so that no one went wanting. Freedom, they understood, required that none lacked necessities, such as shelter, clothing, and food. When an injustice occurred, such as murder, there were no jails or other forms of punishment. Instead, the culprit’s kin were responsible for paying a repentance to the victim’s family so that peace could be preserved.
Such reparations weren’t isolated practices but part of an ongoing commitment to fairness. Resolving conflicts was a central part of communal life. The Wendat came together daily to converse, and their leaders were persuasive orators. Words mattered and were used to preserve the balance between individual freedom and group belonging, like the scales of justice that are separate yet forever linked.
In many indigenous communities, shamans play a role in maintaining balance, both within the community and individual psyches, as well as with the cosmos. They are adroit at tapping into a seemingly innate need to recover from threats of all kinds and the corresponding longing for a fair life centered on joy rather than suffering. In his extensive study of shamanism, historian Mircea Eliade observed that it “defends life, health, fertility, the world of ‘light,’ against death, diseases, sterility, disaster, and the world of ‘darkness’.”
The shaman’s method is not rhetoric but ecstatic transformation: a state of heightened emotions that lead to an embodied sense of transcending suffering and feeling renewed. The shaman, like the Wendat leader, uses words, along with dancing and drumming, to kindle spiritual freedom. Yet her or his words are typically a secret language through which they speak with animals and spirits, expanding beyond everyday language into a more inclusive universe where both individuals and communities find their way back to the light. According to Eliade, these “secret languages” were the birth of lyric poetry. He further claimed, “Poetic creation still remains an act of perfect spiritual freedom.”
I share this with you to make the point that not only do we need reason and dialogue to maintain our individual freedoms and collective sense of belonging, but we also need poetry as the embodied, lyrical language that can transcend our internal sense of being caught, bound, injured, or limited, whether by our communities, our own minds, or misalignment with anima mundi. It might not be poetry that transforms you; perhaps it is music or dance. Yet that interplay of freedom and belonging is inseparable from our souls, which I venture cannot be found without some kind of soul play. The poet Theodore Roethke wrote,
“It is paradoxical that a very sharp sense of the being, the identity of some other being—and in some instances, even an inanimate thing—brings a corresponding heightening and awareness of one’s own self, and, even more mysteriously, in some instances, a feeling of the oneness of the universe.”
Healing from life’s traumas is also a transformative experience; it is not simply change. Like the continual growth and adaptation required between individuals and their shared community to keep freedom alive, healing requires commitment to finding new horizons of possibilities that might stir that unitive feeling through which we find our freest selves in the crucible of belonging. Healing from trauma is soul play. For me, poetry is the language that speaks from that place where the community we belong to (found in language) meets the unique self struggling to come alive in its singular expression.
References
Eliade, Mircea. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Translated by Translated from the French by Willard R. Trask. Bollingen Series LXXVI. Second ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964/2004.
Graeber, David, and David Wengrow. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021.
Roethke, Theodore. On Poetry & Craft. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 1965/2001.
First published 20 February 2023.
