This piece is part of an ongoing series of journals from my work at Stafford Creek Correctional Center through the Evergreen Prison Education Program.

The beauty inside is sometimes too much.

I still don’t quite know what drew me to the prisons and to prison education. I do not have lived experience of prison, nor does my family.

I do have experience of trauma. So do the folks inside. That’s something we share.

But it is the beauty that strikes me the most. I could not have known the beauty I would encounter inside. The beauty is the people. The beauty is what’s possible.

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One of my professors invited me to run a workshop in his capstone class. Capstone is the final class for most of our students. 

I knew immediately what I wanted to teach. Lesson one from the Changemakers Lab curriculum: Personal vision.

And so I proposed the following prompt, lifted from environmentalist Joanna Macy’s Work That Reconnects:

If you knew you could not fail, what would you do in service to life on Earth? Here is our chance to pull out the stops and think big, with no ifs or buts getting in the way.

My professor approved and the prompt went to prison with him earlier this week as homework for our vision workshop.

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Today I woke up at 5am to go into the prison with another faculty of the Evergreen Prison Education Program. We drove through the dark and the mist to the coast of Washington, to grey Aberdeen, and then onward, to a coastal highway, and the unmarked road that leads to Stafford Creek Correctional Center (SCCC).

We went through security. I had my authorization papers, my license, and a special clear bag issued to program students, containing a water bottle, a notebook, and a pen.  We had a Rubbermaid of books for the students. I noticed that the books had their own authorization papers, just like mine.

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B., one of our capstone students, approached me on a break and asked me, Did you make the prompt for our class next Tuesday?

When I confirmed, he fixed me with an intent look and said, That question is so big.

And then he said, Nobody has ever asked me that question.

And then he said, I’ve never thought about that question.

I’ve been so selfish, he said, and I winced.

He was vibrating with intensity, I could feel his immense desire to relay this to me.

It’s such a big question, he said again. It’s overwhelming.

This was something my professor and I had talked about. In some of the other readings in the curriculum, Prentis Hemphill’s What It Takes to Heal, for example, we had learned that vision is difficult for traumatized and system-impacted people to even think about. Mainly because to be in survival mode is to be frozen in the present (or in the case of trauma, in the past). Vision requires imagining a future.

So my professor and I had talked about the possibility that the students would struggle with the prompt, and that our follow up class might actually be a seminar on barriers to accessing vision.

With this in mind, I asked him, What would make this question smaller or less overwhelming?

And he looked at me and said, No, I want it to be big. I want to really answer it right. I’m going to have to think about it.

Then he continued, It’s like a seed. The question is a seed. But I’m having trouble even imagining it.  I see myself in a forest. But I’m like this, he said, and he gestured to his bland khaki prison uniform. Then he said, I haven’t been in the woods in twenty years.

And this is where my concern for him tipped into an almost overwhelming encounter with grief, and beauty.  Because this question, from Joanna Macy, had snuck into the prison through me. And this question struck the person before me, the person with the tattoos and reading glasses and shining eyes, for the first time.

No one had ever asked him this. I feel such grief in this. This person is my age. Until this moment no one had ever asked him, What would you do in service to life on Earth? No one had ever asked him when he was a bright-eyed child, What gift are you here to deliver?

And so the adult before me had never even conceived of the question.

And yet. This question had struck my heart, and then made its way through layers of razor wire and shatterproof glass, to a place where no forests are permitted and books must have papers.

This question had struck the soul of this person, this incarcerated student, this person who caused harm over 20 years ago, and had shaken him to his core.

And I realized nothing was wrong here. There was nothing I needed, as program associate, as healer, to fix.

No advice, even, to give. The student knew. He was going to sit with the question. He was going to let it rock him. He was going to let it in, to pierce his armor, to reach his heart.

The bravery in that. The beauty. How I wanted to weep with him.

Instead I smiled as he said goodbye. I thanked him, and said his name, to let him know I knew he was a person.

I recall a piece of advice for deep listening. Listen as if the person is your child and they are uttering their first words.

I cannot wait to hear what he says in class on Tuesday. I’m holding my breath.