What are you planting this September?

digital collage of flowers over a branded September 2025 Freedom Oklahoma graphic — ID: collage with a black background and text “September 2025” and a logo for Freedom Oklahoma and Freedom Oklahoma’s annual conference, The Freedom Sessions. Around the border is a collage of different flowers.

What are you planting this September?

I have been thinkin’ about and talkin’ to friends about liberation and freedom a lot lately. What it looks like, how it could feel, how we engage in it, if you can do that ethically, and what “ethical” liberation even means.

When I asked the folks at Freedom Oklahoma about what liberation could look like, I heard it looks like “bellies are full of food and laughter, where “we all linger after the party of over to help clean”, it feels like “warmth on your skin from the perfect day”, “having all your community needs met”, “no borders”. When I talked to folks outside of this tiny staff it sounded like a mix of “opportunity and abundance,” “room to breathe, to rest,” “freedom feels like a firefly. It's both so close you can feel the light but never will you catch it,” and “[I] haven’t felt free in a long time at work - [I work for the federal government.]”.

*ID: background photo of a firefly landing on a blade of grass with text "Freedom is like a firefly" with a Freedom Oklahoma logo*

This is what I ask myself when I check-in about how I’m showing up in my communities. When I need to be real with myself about whether I’m living the values I’m asking others to live. Does this feel like freedom? Is this a step closer to our liberation? If you’ve been following along this past year, you might have noticed our work making a shift. Slowing down in this rapid response, high demand world. Because while the world is speeding up, our needs are still the same, and the urgency isn’t getting us closer to meeting them. Our communities are the same messy, expansive, loving, learning (did I mention messy?) spaces to care for one another and be an active participant in. And so much of the work seems to be constantly discovering that. That our community isn’t a one time opt in, it’s constant collaboration with folks we love and folks who seem to know just the right way to enrage us. So finding out what liberation and freedom looks like to each of you, to us in collectives, helps us figure out the center of our work. What seeds of liberation we plant and which we help water, and how we as a community tend to those buds of liberation towards the blooms of the future where we all of the safety, community, and resources to thrive, wherever we call home.

From the conversations we’ve been having we have heard people need places to reconnect to one another, to practice constructive conflict together, as well as to work on connection recognizing our own biases, assumptions, and projections. Places to learn repair as local and federal governments try to divide us - so we’re excited for an opportunity to host a talking circle with Restorative Justice Institute of Oklahoma to help kick off The Freedom Sessions. As Oklahoma schools have been continuous targets for hyper-local and national assault on education and families in the public education system, we know it's been hard for both guardians and students alike. So we have partnered with Mili Jha for a freedom session on the connection between our advocacy for youth in public education, the rise of carceral punishment of youth, and abolitionist practices that can be applied to both. Mili is also a trusted board member & I think it means a great deal when a board member is willing to get involved and share knowledge outside of their board role. This year’s dedicated youth track includes programming by current and former interns, each sharing with us some of the brilliance that they poured into this work and community, and has impacted how we do the work in ways that continue to evolve and expand.

ID: graphic announcing Mili Jha’s presentation, Education Is Liberation, as part of The Freedom Sessions 9/6/25, with the session description on the graphic “What is the relationship between abolition and education? In this workshop, we will discuss the place of abolitionist pedagogy and policies in education by analyzing the development of carceral punishment in American education alongside increasingly systematic adult mass incarceration. Using Paulo Freire and bell hooks' philosophies of liberatory education, we will challenge contemporary values in education and craft futures which do away with policing youth behavior, at a minimum. All attendees interested in youth justice and resistance through education are encouraged to attend. This workshop will be adapted from Mili's paper 'Education is Liberation', in volume 75 of the International Journal of Philosophy and History of Education.”

As September 6th quickly approaches, bringing The Freedom Sessions with it, I’ve been reflecting on The Freedom Sessions from last year. I was driving back home with my nephew and listening to the session from my car stuck in a traffic jam. That's when I learned from Mask Block OKC about the connection of disability justice, Palestine, and proper masking - I’m so grateful they will be back this year talking about Long COVID and sharing their expansive justice-centered work. I remember sitting in that traffic jam thinking “what do you mean I’m not masking properly? I’m wearing a mask?!” but the car ride gave me time to process a new MS diagnosis, years of advocacy and a want to be a better advocate for others and myself - this presentation and ask was an act of love. It asked me to take some critique lovingly offered, and change my behavior to be better in community with each of you. I love you and want to be in community and action with you; I love you enough to try and educate you; I love you enough to learn and change my behavior accordingly. I was in a place to learn, and it was uncomfortable, and I needed it. It was a seed that helped me make a change to be a better and informed community member and advocate.

To me, allyship and care is the act of continuing to grow. It is being okay with getting uncomfortable hearing someone we respect, like, love when they tell us how to show up better. It’s learning that the conditions we’re planted in may have caused us to make assumptions about how much we can flourish, and learning that doesn’t have to be the case. And isn't that love in action? Asking for someone to stand with us in vulnerable situations and beyond? In this metaphor we’re the seeds and the soil and the caretakers, each at different points and in different parts of community, at different phases of life, in every day we exist on this planet.

ID: graphic from The Freedom Sessions Lunch & Learn series, The Solidarity Sessions, featuring a meme by @connectwithoumou of three people in Spiderman costumes, each pointing at one another with text “Why Won’t Anyone Help Me? I never ask for help. I only offer help” over a background featuring someone with their hands in the soil with plants and text on a green background “Care as tending” with a Freedom Oklahoma logo.

So, let’s do the work of tending and growing together? Let’s blossom beyond the conditions in which we’re currently living. Let’s outgrow the planter we’ve been contained to, and ask what’s possible when we push beyond the boundaries of the status quo. Let’s do that work, Saturday September 6 at The Freedom Sessions, and every day after. Let’s plant the seeds of liberation, and see them grow.

In Solidarity,

Mauree Turner

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P.S. Cole refused to let me send this email without a plug for one of their favorite works of speculative fiction, Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 by M. E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi. They say it’s a must-read to help expand the idea of how we imagine and manifest a future, where the revolution has come and we live in its aftermath, building the kind of world we all are working towards. How we do that imagining tied to our realities. And how we continue to dream together.