Beyond The Wall

Letter from Tom

September 16, 2007

As Ralphie and I were watching the news on CNN this morning (Tom’s cartoon dog that he draws), I thought of how the situation in the Middle East seems to be never-ending. I’m glad Ralphie doesn’t start his day reading about Shiite dogs killing Sunni dogs, or Palestinian suicide hounds being mowed down by heavily armed Israeli soldier dogs. I’m glad he doesn’t listen to some dog on CNN telling him that everything that could have gone wrong yesterday did go wrong – while completely ignoring all examples of dog cooperation; dog compassion, dogs making love, not war.

To love the unlovable and forgive the unforgivable has to be among the greatest challenges of this lifetime, and yet, if we are to move beyond the “eye for an eye” mentality that pervades our society, we must do this. If we are to have peace, both within and without, we must do this.

It’s much easier to lose sight of our oneness and to feel separated from each other if we depersonalize and dehumanize each other. Once a person is labeled as “not like us”, the rules of civilized behavior can be bent and stretched.

In our attempts to label each other, we create an “other” and language itself becomes a weapon. I am not interested in weapons, whether words or guns. I want to be part of the rescue team for this warring planet. The rescuers will be those people who help other people to think clearly and to be honest and open-minded. They will be an antidote to those people who disconnect us. They will move beyond the labels and make others more understandable and sympathetic.

Labels help us to hang on to what we feel are our justified feelings of unforgiveness and separation. It’s easy to erase “insurgents”, “enemy combatants”, “terrorists”, even “protesters”. Once we have a label that doesn’t fit, we can ignore the humanity of the labeled. Once the concept of otherness takes root, the unimaginable becomes possible. Then we can ignore and judge those who have committed heinous crimes, those who appear to be so different from us.

In Iraq, our soldiers call the insurgents “rats”. Psychologically, humans can kill rats much more easily than they can kill hungry, tired, frightened young people much like themselves.

The task that you and I have with our writings is to tell stories and eternal truths that connect readers to all the people of the earth, to show these people as the complicated human beings they really are, with histories, families, emotions, and legitimate needs. Then we can replace one-dimensional stereotypes with multi-dimensional individuals with whom our readers can identify.

I’m becoming more aware that all differences, whether physical, mental, or emotional, are superficial. They are like the waves on the surface of the ocean. Deep within we share the same inner depths. Beneath the ever-changing waves, we are the same, we remain the same unchanging One. As we become more aware, so our concepts of both ourselves and the journey change, and we come to realize the deeper truth: that the traveler, the journey, and the goal are all one.

Looking for the Rainbow

by Charles “Tom” Brown
Copyright 2007

In coming to prison, I have found that there is always a gift waiting once the ache and fear and grief have settled. As the cries are absorbed into silence, as the sun always rises just when the night seems like it will never end, there is something indestructible at the center of each of us; though it can be quite painful being transformed and rearranged.

My own struggle to open my heart has ben a long one. Silence and solitude are now like a lamp to illumine corners I’ve never seen. When I stop replaying events in my life, the buried seeds crack open in the dark the instant they surrender to a process they can’t see. Stripped of material goods and plans, I have discovered that we cannot eliminate hunger, but we can feed each other. We cannot eliminate loneliness, but we can hold each other. We cannot eliminate pain, but we can live a life of compassion.

In the middle of the deepest, darkest night, when we feel most humbled by life, the first shadow of our wings begins to appear. The depth of the darkness reveals to us the magic of who we are. The love that we are is just waiting to be unleashed.

The most important thing to remember during times of great change is to fix our eyes anew on the things that don’t change. The life that we want will emerge from a stillness that takes root in our soul. We find it when we settle deeply into the hidden loving dimensions of every moment, allowing life to be what it wants to be and allowing ourselves to be who we were created to be.

Sometimes our suffering shapes us as it makes us more humble, more contrite, and more open to guidance we had rejected before. Sometimes the fire we go through becomes our purifying agent. Sometimes difficult experiences have the effect of a storm. Afterwards, we see a beauty in the sky and a clearness in the air that were not there before. What was chaotic at the time, ultimately had a healing effect. And sometimes, when we’re really fortunate, we look up in the sky and see a rainbow. It could not have happened without the rain.