As the great gospel song says, I “woke up this morning with my mind stayed on freedom.”

I didn’t realize that was the case until late in the day but looking back at the day, it’s clear it was there all day long.

Freedom was a clear theme when, over my morning coffee, I read “This Day in History,” a daily feature from the wonderful @MysticStampCompany, which is often the source of #stampoftheday ideas.

There I learned that on March 5, 1960, the US Post Office issued 4- and 8-cent stamps honoring Thomas G. Masaryk, a key founder of the Republic Czechoslovakia, which was created from the remnants of the Austo-Hungarian Empire after World War I . Masaryk served as the country’s first president from 1918 until 1935 when ill health forced him to step down. Less than three years later, the Nazis took part of the country and a year later they invaded the rest.

I have a soft spot for the country and Masaryk because “freedom” was a recurring theme in late September 2018 when Jody and I spent a week in the Czech Republic (in what I think was our last overseas trip before the pandemic.) We were there for some celebrations of the republic’s centennial that featured images of and homages to Masaryk.

The loss of – and fights for—freedom was a recurring theme on that trip. Our time in Prague coincided, almost exactly, with Sukkot – which meant we weren’t able to tour most of the city’s famed Jewish Quarter, and its reminders of all the freedoms lost to the Holocaust. But we were reminded of that fate (and the struggle for religious freedom) when I was recruited to be part of a minyan at the ancient “Old-New Synagogue” and Jody and I got to join in a Kiddush in a sukkah in the courtyard in the High Synagogue next door. Several days later, at the end of a short bike trip in Bohemia, we were again reminded of both the Holocaust and the possibilities of renewal when we came upon a former synagogue in Chesky Krumlov that has been restored as a Jewish cultural center, complete with exhibits about the city’s once vibrant Jewish community.

Prague had several other powerful reminders of freedom. There was an outdoor exhibit about artists, musicians, and scholars who fled the country first from the Nazis and later from Soviet domination. There also was a relatively new museum that featured art made during the long years of Communist rule. There was a powerful museum about life under Communist rule. And one afternoon, towards the end of a long day of walking, we stumbled upon the amazing John Lennon Wall, where for several decades, artists and others have been leaving messages of love, hope, peace, and freedom.

In addition to the Masaryk stamps, the Mystic website also highlighted a seminal freedom-related speech, given on March 6, 1850 by Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, who was pictured on several stamps in the late 1800s, including the 1870 stamp shown here.

Webster—one of his era’s greatest orators and one of the great pre-Civil War senators – argued for the Compromise of 1850, which had been offered by Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky (aka “The Great Compromiser”), another towering pre-Civil War senator. The Compromise of 1850, which admitted California as a free state, also included a controversial new Fugitive Slave Act, which made it much easier to arrest Blacks in free states, make the case that they were runaway slaves, and then take them South to be sold back into slavery.

Defending that law, Webster asserted: “Every member of every Northern legislature is bound by oath…to support the Constitution of the United States; and the article of the Constitution which says to these States that they shall deliver up fugitives from service is as binding in honor and conscience as any other article. No man fulfills his duty in any legislature who sets himself to find excuses, evasions, escapes from this constitutional obligation.”

Webster’s position – which was roundly criticized in Massachusetts—stood in stark contrast to an inscription that Jody and I saw today at the “Boston’s Women’s Memorial,” an installation on the Commonwealth Avenue Mall in Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood. The quote -—from Phyllis Wheatley, who had been enslaved and later wrote the first book by an African published in America – was “In every human Breast, God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of Freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance…the same Principle lives in us.”

The fourth, and final signs of freedom relate our walk, where we saw signs of spring and also discussed Passover, the great holiday celebrating both freedom and spring, which we’ll observe at the end of the month. In the Public Garden, we saw amber-colored buds on willow trees, a clear sign that spring will come, even to New England. And when we returned home, we saw buds forming on the rhododendron next to our front door (which also seems early for this part of the world). Those signs of spring reminded me of the third stamp highlighted today on the Mystic website: a 3-cent stamp, issued in 1940, picturing Luther Burbank, who was born on March 7, 1849, and went on to develop more than 800 strains and varieties of plants before he died in April 1926.

So, while I didn’t know I would be doing it, I spent much of the day “keeping my mind on freedom.” That’s more than ok, because, as the song notes, “there ain’t nothing wrong with keeping my mind stayed on freedom.”

Be well, stay safe, keep your mind stayed on freedom, fight for justice, and work for peace.