AFTER TEN YEARS, WE MOVE OUR OFFICE
The new office in progress.
Our original office was at the corner of Pine and 15th St. in downtown Boulder, right around the corner from the Shambhala Center. I came on board as paid staff circa 2004. Our sponsors, Cliff and Margot Neuman, owned the building but eventually sold it about ten years ago, and we moved into an office suite in downtown Niwot, a small town halfway between Boulder and Longmont.
I had a hard time adjusting after so long in the center of the action in Boulder, but eventually Niwot came to charm me. Other than one Subway sub shop and a gas station, it’s—refreshingly—all local businesses. It became my neighborhood: Garden Gate Café (classic breakfast place), Winot Coffee Company (down there for a large chai to get through the afternoon), Niwot Market (their soup makes a cheap lunch), and Niwot Tavern (when we had the pleasure to sit down for dinner). I did a reading from my book Transmigration Suite at Inkberry Books.
I have a particular fondness for Niwot’s “Rock & Rails” concerts every Thursday night in the summer. They have an open stretch of park space next to the railroad tracks along the Diagonal (the road between Boulder and Longmont) where they park food trucks and put quality local bands on the bandstand. It’s a weekly town party, and everyone, from little kids running around and gossiping cliques of teenagers all the way up to senior citizens in wheelchairs, turns out for it. The sun sets late over a beautiful vista of the Rockies, and everyone cheers when the train clanks by.
It has all lent me a sense of identity that you get from being in a location and feeling comfortable in it.
CRIMINAL KARMA AND BEARING WITNESS TO GRIEF
It’s hard to get a purchase on the reality of nearly two million people incarcerated in the U.S. on any given day of the year. It’s an American reality, and if it’s got two million people directly in its grip, how many more people become affected when their brother or father or son (it’s mostly males), their friend or cousin or coworker gets hauled off. There’s a ripple effect on other people that’s got to far surpass two million.
For the person behind bars, that’s part of the grief of it. Often, if they have young children, they feel the pain of them growing up without their father being able to mark their birthdays or see them learn to walk or start to play Little League. If he does get to see them, he’s shocked at how much they’ve grown and changed without him really knowing much about it. He’s become extraneous to their lives, even if he can talk to them once in a while on the phone. On the other end, inmates get the phone call that says a parent has died, but they can do little but fret on their bunk about not being there. Part of the prison experience becomes getting ripped from the fabric of a life you belonged in and from relationships that mattered.
Sometimes families wholly reject the inmate, refusing even to talk on the phone to them. They become shunned and abandoned.
Now, of course, this is all the outcome of karma, by which I mean, understandable, right in front of your nose karma, where said inmate acted illegally, got caught, and now pays the price: cause and effect. In general, people aren’t forsaken by their families without a lot of bad behavior leading up to that. Prison institutionalization puts up plenty of barriers to staying connected that go far beyond the razor wire, not the least being how inmates are moved around the prison system, and often they’re sent quite far from their home, making it hard for their families to go visit them. Then the inmate gets a number of years to stew in his grief about what he’s lost, what he’s separated from, and maybe most bitter, if he can get to it, what he’s brought upon himself.
A FEW REFLECTIONS ON PRISON AGGRESSION AND THE MEDITATIVE PATH
The Buddhist tradition gets regarded as pacifistic. It definitely emphasizes not creating harm–not resorting to aggression in speech or physical violence. But anyone who’s spent real time on the meditation seat knows that aggression often shadows thoughts in some form or another. Over the decades you can see what a refined game it is. Even pretty subtle thoughts can arise purely for the sake of dodging your direct experience and any raw feeling that goes with it. There’s a fundamental aggression in discursive thought habituated to rejecting your own naked experience, and that tendency goes deep.
But then, when I consider what inmates routinely go through, unraveling your own subtle aggression seems like a boutique activity in the face of the very real possibility that someone will try to beat your face in because they don’t like your tone. Or maybe they’re threatening to kick your ass if you don’t hand over your chocolate bars. Whatever it is. It can get a lot uglier from there. [Read more…]
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
I remember as a teenager plucking a book off the rack–-something you saw everywhere back in the 70s, almost as ubiquitous as fat James Michener novels. It was called The Prophet. I opened it randomly and felt struck in the face by what it said:
The murdered is not unaccountable for his own murder,
And the robbed is not blameless in being robbed.
The righteous is not innocent of the deeds of the wicked,
And the white–handed is not clean in the doings of the felon.
Yea, the guilty is oftentimes the victim of the injured,
And still more often the condemned is the burden bearer for
the guiltless and unblamed.
Astounded, I’d never heard such an idea expressed before: it tied the criminal and victim together in a way that did not exalt the innocent and separate them from the crime and the criminal committing it. Instead it pointed to how the two were bound together such that even the innocent became culpable for the violation, and therefore…who really was innocent and who guilty? Where did one end and the other begin? [Read more…]
PRISON AS THE PATH OF PATIENCE
Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso Rinpoche
Probably 20 years ago now, MPP had an audience with Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso Rinpoche. Back in our early days, we had one study course, The Myth of Freedom, based on Trungpa Rinpoche’s book and the resonant title. What else should we be teaching inmates? we wondered. I remember he looked up for a moment into the distance, and then said without hesitation: “The sixth chapter of the Bodhisattvacharyavatara.”
All right. What’s in the sixth chapter of the Bodhisattvacharyavatara—“The Way of the Bodhisattva”? It describes in considerable detail how patience is an antidote to anger. In fact, it has quite a bit to say about anger and all the many reasons we use to justify it. Shantideva, the Indian Buddhist master who wrote this epic poem as a commentary on the bodhisattva path, doesn’t seem to think that there’s really any basis or validity for getting angry about anything at any time for any reason.
Try and tell that to the average convict. [Read more…]
Some Thoughts on Prison as Spiritual Path
Gary Allen at Limon Correctional Facility, Limon, Colorado
SOME THOUGHTS ON PRISON AS SPIRITUAL PATH
by Gary Allen
I first entered a prison in 1990. Back then I was an M.F.A. student in Writing and Poetics at Naropa University. That semester the department offered a one credit course designed to get students teaching creative writing outside the academy grounds, and our teacher arranged for us to lead a two day creative writing program at the Colorado Territorial Correctional Facility in Cañon City, the oldest prison in Colorado.
I remember coming up to the control room for the first time where you passed through the metal detector. The control room window was peppered with holes (as a matter of fact, I think it still is, some 34 years later), clearly from getting blasted with a shot gun. I didn’t know what to expect from such a place, and I probably would never have tried to go into it without having my hand held, so to speak. [Read more…]