Am I Free Am I Safe Can I Stay

Emerging Writer Series

Every two weeks or so I am publishing an essay from an emerging writer. This week, we are publishing “Am I Free? Am I Safe? Can I Stay?” by Frida Stavenow. Frida splits her time between Sweden and Latin America, where she studies curanderismo with the Shipibo and their plant allies. She’s interested in entheogens, horses, cats, ritual, more-than-human communications, sexuality, cultural systems, and Muay Thai. She has performed her poetry in strip clubs and churches and has published in Rebel Writers Club, typishly and Allusions of Innocence. At present, she is co-writing an experimental memoir with the sacred Amazonian plant medicine ayahuasca; one of many ways she seeks to contribute towards decolonising the world, the word, and the human spirit.

**A brief note on the text: initials and some identifying characteristics have been altered to protect the identities of vulnerable individuals.

---

The Workaway listing said it was a sanctuary for horses, but really, we all knew the true rescues were us. Though we spent our days bottle-feeding foals found in dumpsters with broken bones, bathing three-legged cats and slicing week-old lettuce for turtles previously used as footballs, we did so on reprieve from lives of homelessness, drug addiction, PTSD, overbearing parents, no parents, jobs in corporate finance, college.

Some of us had money; most of us didn’t. Nearly all of us felt a sense of freedom upon arriving that we had never thought possible. We would look at each other, like children finding a hole in the kindergarten fence, amazed that things could be so simple and terrified that maybe they couldn't, not really, that all this could be taken away just as easily as it had been given.

We saw it in the animals, too. The blind Arabian mare who’d lived all her life alone in a barn, taking her first tentative steps across the dust-covered volcanic rocks and lifting her head towards the sea as if to ask: Am I free? Am I safe? Can I stay? She was put in a paddock with a self-effacing bay gelding and her body relaxed, went from a taut bow to something made of flesh, fur, life. Her eyes closed, her breath slowed, and everyone at the sanctuary knew exactly how she felt.

In the evenings, we swam in crystal-clear waters and made lavish dinners out of food found in supermarket bins. ‘Freegan’ we called it; a portmanteau of ‘free’ and ‘vegan’ that seemed to encompass all we wished the world would do differently. Conserve. Collaborate. Connect. Rejected food, rejected animals, rejected people, rejected sofas, cabinets, tables and wooden pallets all found new life on the sunbaked Tenerifan hilltop we were slowly learning to call home.

True, sometimes the Supermarket Team brought back meat and dairy: fig yogurts and Iberian ham, Manchego cheese a day out of date. Some of us ate it, most of us didn’t. If we did, we did so while stressing that we weren’t supporting the systems, weren’t complicit, weren’t paying into industries perpetuating fear and abuse and exploitation.

Of course, we lived off their surplus. In a way, we were vultures; a bird near-universally abhorred but also recognised, in more than a few cultures, as a symbol for the transformation of death into life. We took surplus produce from supermarkets and turned it into meals and food banks and compost for zucchini beds watered by solar-powered shower stalls. To pay for the water, we took surplus money from philanthropically-inclined doctors, lawyers, business owners, bankers. Sometimes we took their surplus time, too, in the form of subsidy applications, advice on zoning laws, a neck adjustment.

The more cash we raised, the more animals we could save. This ethos drove us as we designed rustic-chic holiday rentals, paid volunteer days, Adopt-a-Horse schemes. We made content, cold-called vegan businesses, shook donation boxes outside supermarkets. We organized sports challenges, blogged, created Go-Fund-Mes for our birthdays. We got international schools involved, and then the international school kids organized sports challenges, blogged, and created Go-Fund-Mes for their sweet 16s. For the right cause, we were learning, the world was willing to give.

More than anything, we shared. We shared papayas and hoof-picks and books. We shared the stories of Why We’d Left; of the broken relationships, unpayable rents, jobs that had made us ill. We shared joints and beds and rides to town for staples that didn’t fall off shelves enough to be forever available (olive oil, coffee, rolling papers). We shared knowledge of natural building techniques, permaculture principles, ways of filtering greywater with papyrus. Non-coercive horse-training tricks. Card games. Recipes for borscht, dhaal, panzanella.

“I feel like my spirit was, like, a butterfly, trapped in a jar,” said the burnt-out VP of Sales from Minneapolis three days into his two-week stay in the Mongolian yurt, at €650 and with its own bathroom, our most luxurious rental. “And now it’s been let out. I had no idea it was possible to live like this, with no commute, no suits, no bills—and still have friends. Have food. Have fun.”

“Fancy that,” said the English teacher-turned-YouTuber from Croatia, who still taught online in the afternoons and shot face-to-cams about location independence at golden hour. “Man has needs met outside capitalist means of production, finds soul.”

She was wry, and she was right. Bit by bit, we all began reconnecting with something within that had been lost for so long we’d forgotten it was there. Art Directors started painting, Copywriters wrote poems, Accountants picked up harmonicas. We fell in love. We fell in lust. We fell out. We fell for each other’s boyfriends, girlfriends, sisters, cousins. We fell ill, the whole community at once, vomit pooling in tire tracks and drying in the sun. Within an hour, ducks came and ate what remained.

Naturally, we knew that some of us had bigger problems than others. Builder K—wiry, million-dollar smile, undefinable Balkan accent—struggled to sleep, suffered hallucinations, kept asking what the white van was doing at the end of the driveway every morning. Still he pushed his barrowfuls of cement through the African heat, day after day, one eye forever on the gate as he increased our volunteer housing at a pace three men would struggle to match. Former fine dining chef Q—thin, sparse-toothed, years out of luck—spent hours in the kitchen every Tuesday roasting squash, stuffing unchosen turkeys, whistling and flirting with the builder boys like someone decades younger than his late 60s, or were they 70s, with Q nobody really knew. But we did know that not three hours later, he’d be found irate, no longer whistling, instead spitting and twitching as he swore and slammed doors and shouted at pale-faced holiday rental girls for brushing their teeth in the wrong sink.

Q was spoken to. Many times. Q was consoled, hugged, brought to doctors to get pills for his flaking arms and mind. Q would apologize. Q would be forgiven. Q would reignite, like a once-dying fire, before long lighting up the kitchen anew with his stories, his ribald jokes, his undying desire to live another day. When the sun rose the next morning, he’d rise with it, almost sober, and start caring for the small garden in front of his container. He’d placed in it three old yogurt pots, and in them, he’d planted three small red flowers, fat, sturdy, near gummy-like in texture. Once again whistling, he’d tend to these plants for hours, hands barely shaking as he built eggshell caterpillar barriers and complicated shading structures to protect this new life he had created in the middle of a desert.

Some said we shouldn’t allow the sick to stay with us. That we couldn’t care for them properly, or maybe, if some rescue Rioja had come through, that we could catch what they had. Could spread it, think of the food, he doesn’t even wear gloves. But nothing changed. As with so many broken mirrors, fence posts, and doors, it was ultimately assumed that the broken people were somebody else’s responsibility.

We grew, from 20 to 30 to 50. Took on more animals, raised more money, bought more land. Little by little, it became harder to keep track, stay coherent, remain aligned. Before long we needed two kitchens, two community areas, two sets of solar-powered shower stalls. One camp began hosting Nonviolent Communication workshops. The other got a larger speaker, built a bar, installed an extra generator for the beer fridge.

The blind Arabian mare and the self-effacing bay gelding grew closer. As their connection grew, so did their bellies, thighs, tails. The blind mare would forever be blind, but soon enough the self-effacing bay gelding grew so much stronger that his self-effacement effaced itself, turned into curiosity, playfulness, a zest for life so infectious it caught the eye of a 13-year-old Polish girl on visit with the international school. She started coming at weekends, driven by her mom, an efficient character with cash to spend. They began taking the gelding away for half an hour at a time, at first lunging, soon riding. Meanwhile the blind mare could be heard screaming from her paddock, their paddock, except for those 30 minutes it wasn’t. For those 30 minutes, it was once again the solitary confinement in which she’d grown up, walls no longer built of rock but of memories. She paced back and forth, back and forth, in panic, searching for the sanctuary she had found and lost.

When K tried to kill himself, we all reacted differently. Some of us sprung into solemn action, calling clinics, grabbing bin bags and mops and bottles of disinfectant. Others cried and raged at the people they felt should’ve stopped it, should’ve been in charge, even though deep down they knew just as well as the next person that nobody was. That this was why we’d come. In a world forever telling us what to do, we had broken loose to form a haven free from authority, from demands, from protection.

Sandstorms blew around us as K was taken in by the only hospital on the island that didn’t ask for papers. Q made zucchini and sweet potato pasta, and we sat down to eat. Some of us were still crying. Someone said again that we couldn’t keep the sick, couldn’t care for them, couldn’t be held responsible. Others asked where they should go, then—If not here, where? We looked down into our bowls in silence. Desert dust blew in through the windows and landed on the pasta like freshly cracked black pepper.

In the next few days, many of us left. The sharp needle prick of reality had burst our near-utopian bubble, and people felt a need for the familiar comforts of protection, of demands, of authority. We went from 50, to 40, to 35. Meetings were held. Officially none of us wanted to be a leader, and yet one of us was widely known as the person who could ask people who had stayed years to leave, could reshuffle teams, could introduce rules. And so she did, and bit by bit, the ecology of our refuge began to shift.

The Arabian mare’s arthritis got worse. She stopped being able to walk, then stand, then sleep. The decision to end her life was captured by the Social Media team and shared to Instagram, YouTube and Facebook along with a link to donate. Average cost of sending a horse over the rainbow bridge with dignity: 400€. A few weeks later, another post announced the adoption of the bay gelding by the Polish teen and her mom. In the photos they look happy, full of life, heads lifted towards the future.

“We’re an animal rescue,” our leader who didn’t want to be a leader took to saying at the start of our Wednesday meetings. “Not a people rescue. If you want to stay here, you need to work.” People nodded or said nothing. Those who said nothing looked at their hands, at their morals, at whether they felt free, felt safe, whether they wanted to stay even if they were allowed. Usually they were gone by the next meeting, or if they weren’t, they’d be found nodding, too.

Some of those who left went back to the lives they’d had before the sanctuary; to overbearing parents, to loving parents, to soul-killing jobs and inspiring jobs and friends and lovers and homes. To demands and authority and the protection they received in return. Others didn’t have this option, and they left hard-jawed, disillusioned, mumbling about lost ideals, greed, and the inhumanity of the crowd as they walked off down the motorway clutching ragged sleeping bags and freshly-Sharpied hitchhiking signs.

Of those who could go back, not all did. One volunteer set up her own community in Finland. One changed her major from Marketing to Sustainable Land Management, one took his Marketing degree to a homelessness charity in Glasgow, one joined a campaign for food sovereignty in Rwanda, one started a poetry zine, one took up rapping, one began teaching Spanish to refugees in Andalucía. Two got married, two had a baby, two bought a van and are driving it to Nepal.

K stayed in the hospital a week then left for Morocco. Last I heard, he’d found a new construction job that comes with accommodation. He has work, friends, enough money for tobacco and beers and tagine. Q was moved by the Volunteer Coordinator to a stretch of undeveloped coastline known for its caves, nighttime fires, miscellaneous community of travelers. As he left the car, he said he was going to paint rocks and sell them to tourists, five euro a piece, easy. I don’t know if this happened. The two times I visited, nobody knew Q’s name, and he hasn’t had a phone for years.

The day after he was evicted, a 24-year-old Management Consultant from Brussels moved into Q’s house. She replaced his desert flowers with aloe vera that she uses to soothe her sunburnt shoulders after the half marathons she likes to run on Saturday mornings. She’s got strong legs, strong hands and a strong mind. She needs no pills, no concessions, no talkings-to.

Word has it she’s a wiz at grant writing.