Staying put: My city and I’m sticking with it
Home is not where you have to go but where you want to go; nor is it a place where you are sullenly admitted, but rather where you are welcomed—by the people, the walls, the tiles on the floor, the flowers beside the door, the play of light, the very grass.
I was driving alone from Fairbanks to Anchorage a few years ago, dealing with early September snow showers and shoulderless mountain roads. I was intermittently entertaining myself with the awe-inspiring landscape and trying to stay awake by listening to Alaska Public Radio. As the radio signal faded in and out, an author who had recently written a book entitled Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World was being interviewed. Scott Russell Sanders spoke compellingly of creating a life that’s “firmly grounded in household and community, in knowledge of place, in awareness of nature, and in contact with that source from which all things arise.”
I was spellbound by the author’s perspective. And though I had contemplated thoughts of remaining in Alaska a while, I decided then and there to return to Austin and to irrevocably claim it as my home. (more…)
Saturday, January 13th, 2001Finding freedom in the confines of prison
If you think you’re free, there’s no escape possible.
Everything can be taken from a man but the last of the human freedoms—the right to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, the right to choose one’s own way.
It was 1993, and I had been making my weekly thirty-mile trek from my home in Austin, Texas, to Bastrop Federal Correctional Institute for the better part of a year. Each Thursday I worked with inmates in the prison drug and alcohol rehabilitation program, and afterwards I taught creative writing to any man who wanted to join our group.
During my drive on this day I recalled my first trip to Bastrop a few years earlier. I remembered my own deep fear of stepping inside the prison walls that, at first, repelled me. And I remembered my strong desire to be of service to those men, a desire that I didn’t fully understand but that propelled me forward. Nonetheless, when I first heard the stories of transformation of inmates and volunteers alike at the weekend personal awareness workshops, I avoided participating for a year or more. My entire body literally tightened (yes, especially my sphincter) at the imagined sound of that big metal door slamming shut behind me. (more…)
Monday, January 1st, 2001
