Beyond The Wall

Beyond Appearances

By Charles “Tom” Brown
Copyright 2008

It was time to apply for a hearing to get some relief from a long prison sentence. The date had been set by the Clemency Board. A defense fund had been set up to hire an attorney, the letters of support poured in, and friends appeared on my behalf. There was so much loving energy. There were so many prayers expressed. And yet, my application was denied.

My first reaction was, “How could this happen? I don’t understand this. It’s unfair!” As time went by, though, I began to realize that crying “unfair” was keeping me stuck in what hurts. As long as I see what has come to pass as being unfair, I’ll be a prisoner of what might have been.

When I go behind the appearance of unfairness and look at the larger picture, I can begin to change my view of the uncertainties of life. This change brings about an attitude that allows me to discover what is hidden in all experiences. Then I can begin to see wholeness rather than good and bad fortune. In a world of unity, there is no good or bad luck; it’s indivisible. What is called “bad” fortune has “good” just waiting to emerge because it’s the other half.

We have all known a time when it seemed as though the light in our lives might never return. It can feel like that’s all there is. If that is where we are and we’re unable to see a situation as part of a larger picture, let’s remind ourselves that good fortune is leaning on the bad one, just as morning follows night. It’s invisibly there in all moments of despair.

No matter what occurs in our lives, we can become better people because of it. If we had not gone through our difficult time, we could not have learned what it had to teach us. When we have learned to embrace all the cycles of life, our backbones will be a little straighter and our heads will be a little higher. When we have suffered and transcended our suffering, we will emerge with a sacred knowledge embedded in our cells. There is nothing more beautiful than the mantle of a survivor, and there is nothing more illumined than the new personality that comes forth when the old one has been laid to rest.

An Agent for Peace

By Charles “Tom” Brown

In this time of fear and war, the question we must all ask is, “How can I be an agent for peace?” First of all, this means being peace. This is why it is so important for us to go within, quiet our minds, and expand our capacity to look, to see, to understand.

If we destroy our “enemies” we destroy a part of ourselves. It may be a part we do not want to acknowledge or deal with, but it is still a part of us. We cannot hurt others without hurting ourselves. The only reason for destroying our “enemies” is to support our self-deception that “we are not like them”. An eye for an eye response brings only mass blindness.

The unawakened mind is at war with itself and the way things are. Compassion and a greatness of heart arise when we stop the war. The deepest desire we have to our human heart is to discover how to do this. We all share a longing to go beyond the confines of our fear and anger and to connect with something greater than “I”, “Me” and “mine”, greater than our small story and our small self. Our challenge is to discover peace and connectedness in ourselves and to stop the war in and around us.

Sharon Salzberg, a Buddhist teacher, eloquently describes peace as “a deep harmony, a connection to the deepest places within us, deeper than the changing circumstances of our lives.”

Every time we set ourselves aside, even in small ways, every time we reach out and connect with the pain and struggles of others, every time we love something or someone unconditionally, we are agents for peace. We are peace.

copyright 2007

...Ah!

By Charles “Tom” Brown

The young girl sat alone at a table next to mine in the prison visitation room. Her inmate boyfriend had been notified that he had a visitor. However, it finally became evident that he was not coming out. After several hours of waiting, she sadly walked out.

Later, I found out who had refused to see her. I asked him why, and he replied, “Because of what she did, I have fallen out of love with her.”

I thought to myself, “How could that be?” There is no “out of Love”. It’s what we are, deeper and richer than all the spiritual promises and far more ordinary and real. We don’t “fall in or out of love” because we are permanently in the flow of love itself.

Love is the way we are meant to live; love is the measure of the meaning of life. Without it life is a bare existence; with it, life comes alive. It’s the difference that gives life meaning. When we touch life with love, it grows warm and shines down the corridors of the mind with a light that does not fade but grows brighter and more beautiful with the years.

When love is present nothing is the same. Even the drab gray walls of this prison begin to glow. It’s as if we are transported into a different world, love’s world. Then things are seen through love’s eyes. Then the pain may turn into a poem, and the sorrow may blossom as a ministry.

Love is what shines from our eyes, beats from our heart, speaks with our voice, and meets itself everywhere.

Sooner or later, love will reclaim us all. But to let that happen now, to die into love now, before the body dies…

…“Ah!”

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.

On Being Real

by Charles “Tom” Brown
Copyright 2007

The most precious gift we can give to each other is more of our authentic self. It’s so simple and yet so brave to say that we are hurt when we are hurt, that we are sad when we are sad, that we are scared when we are scared.

We waste so much energy trying to cover up who we are when beneath every anger is a wound to be healed and beneath every attitude is the want to be loved. When we hesitate in being direct, we unknowingly slip something on, some added layer of protection that keeps us from feeling the world, and often that covering is the beginning of a loneliness which, if not put down, diminishes our chance for joy.

This covering is like living our lives wearing gloves every time we touch something, and then, forgetting we chose to put them on, we complain that nothing feels quite real. In this way, our challenge each day is not to get dressed to face the world, but to “unglove” ourselves.

The awakened moment is an unprotected meeting with what is – a full contact sport. Our true calling is to find out what it is to be an authentic human being. We are invited to be intimate with the world and experience the bones and breath of each moment.

We can remain who we think we are and sink further into the troubled world we have already made, or we can allow our hearts to crack open like cosmic eggs, out of which will emerge transformed creatures – our true selves. Look at it closely, in yourself and others, and tell me that creature does not have wings.

An Extraordinary Day

By Charles “Tom” Brown
Copyright 2007

For an ordinary day, we can choose to allow our minds to be programmed by the worldy viewpoint that dominates the earth. We can make sure we’re keeping tabs on everything by reading the morning newspapers and watching the television news. This will bring us current on the wars, the terrorist attacks, the latest murders, the economy, the gossip, the natural disasters…all of it. We will have an ordinary day.

However, we need not let fear steal our day; we can set our day upon another course. Each of us has an inner room where we can visit to be cleansed of fear-based thoughts and feelings. When we begin our morning within it, the mind receives a radiance that illumines our thinking as we go through the day. There are many prayer and meditation techniques, and they are paths to this inner room.

As we move through this extraordinary day, let’s remember to do the following:
· Focus on the goodness. See the innate goodness in every being, no matter what they are “bringing to the table.”
· Say this simple prayer – “Bless the. Change me”. When our hearts are closed and clogged with judgment and resentment, this simple prayer puts everything in perspective.
· Be grateful. Give thanks for everything. It’s a form of the heart opening, of attention shifting from “my wants and needs” to just gratitude.
· Remember to smile. A smile is like a comforting hand, a warm blanket, a long-lost friend, a blessing
· Find someone to help. In helping others, we help ourselves in ways that are truly enriching.

And finally, keep the door to the heart open. This door is always near. Truth opens it. Love opens it. Humility opens it. Sadness can open it if felt to its center. Silence and time open it if we enter them and don’t just watch them. This is the doorway that lets us experience the miraculous in the mundane, the extraordinary in the ordinary.

Celebrating Our Humanness

by Charles “Tom” Brown
Copyright 2007

We are both wonderful and difficult at the same time. We are flawed and stuck in old patterns, but it is by and through our humanness that we grow and change and transform. For without the places cracked and softened by experience and time, we remain too hard and fixed to be affected by life.

The first step in freeing ourselves from this burden is to acknowledge the hardening of the heart. Then, without judgment or rejection, we will uncover the great tenderness that resides at the very core of our humanness. Our beauty and our flawed self both arise from the same tenderness. If we can shine warmth and openness into the dark places where we don’t know we’re lovable, this starts to forge a marriage between our beauty and our wounded self.

This is, after all, the love we most long for – this embracing of our humanness, which lets us appreciate ourselves as the luminous beings we are, housed in a vulnerable, flickering form whose endless calling is to move from chrysalis to butterfly, from seed to new birth.

Being wholly and genuinely human means celebrating that we are both vulnerable and indestructible at the same time. I have been broken and failed so many times that my identity has sprouted and peeled like an onion. But because of this, I have lived more than my share of lives and feel both young and old at once. Though I still wonder if I will break, I somehow know it’s all a part of the rhythm of being alive.

Now I understand that as we listen beyond our small sense of things, we begin to see that perhaps it is our humanness that helps us find each other. Perhaps it is precisely because we are not perfect that we complete each other. We see that a magnificent light surrounds us, and no matter how we turn or are turned, the magnificence follows.

Flying Lessons

by Charles “tom” Brown
Copyright 2007

     When a mother eagle is about to let go of her eaglets, she does a couple of things to get them out of the nest. She starts bringing them less food every day. She also begins to remove their nest, branch by branch. She dismantles the resting place.

     From one point of view that can seem cruel. What a terrible thing to do! But when we look at it from a larger perspective, from a bigger viewpoint, we see that she’s giving her young the freedom to exercise their wings and fly.

     When we graduate from a certain level of being here, life does the same thing to us. It withdraws old sources of nourishment and reminds us it’s time to go to another level of awareness. By removing our old source of nourishment, we discover greater reserves of strength and power within us.

     No bird can fly without opening its wings, and none of us can love without exposing our hearts. Anytime we hesitate revealing who we are, we can picture ourselves as a bird perched on a roof, wings tucked at our sides. To enter a relationship without opening our heart is to jump off that roof without spreading our wings. That we must move through the fear of flying before being upheld is what trusting is all about.

     When we bring up what we keep inside, it is sacred and scary, and we’re often not sure if we want to touch it or not. By going inside, though, and bringing out whatever we find there, we discover that it makes all the difference. Our revelations become our wings. Then we can say, “This is who I am when no one is looking.” For each of us is a fledgling that eventually, if fed, will fly.

Domino Lessons

by Charles “Tom” Brown

The signs in the prison visitation room stated the many restrictions. Don’t do this. Don’t do that. Dress a certain way. Act a certain way. However, in the middle of all of this, a free spirit was on the loose. A young boy, perhaps three or four years old, decided to have fun with the dominoes his dad was trying to put into a container. He picked up handfuls of them and gleefully began throwing them in the air. The more the adults tried to gather up the dominoes and get him to stop it, the more fun he had.

As I watched this scene, I thought of some things I’d like to say to this little fellow –

“Remain excited at the discovery of dominoes; it tells us there is significance in small things, when our eyes have gotten too focused on the big things.

“Keep laughing and giggling when you are surprised and delighted; it offers our ears the music of grace.

“Play with other children on playgrounds; it shows us that all people of all backgrounds can meet each other with open hearts.

“Keep talking to the dogs and cats and pigeons and the ducks; it reminds us that the spirit is present in all living things.

“You have the gift of innocence. You have the gift of dreams. When we see you laughing and playing, throwing those dominoes in the air, our spirits take wing. When we lift you and hold you, we are consecrating a World of hope.

“You are hope when our hope has dimmed. You are joy when our hearts are heavy. In you we see the world as we dream that it could be.

For you remind us what it means to be alive.”

Cries of the Heart

by Charles “Tom” Brown
Copyright 2007

As a teacher’s aide in the Arizona prison system, I often help students to prepare for their GED essay requirement. To prepare for this, they are given the format and the topic for their essay. A recent topic was, “If you could have one wish, what would it be?” and I assumed that most would be wishes to get out of prison or something of that nature. Instead, many were cries of the heart…cries to love and be loved.

One essay stated, “If I could have one wish, I would wish for a letter from my mother. She hasn’t written to me in years and it would mean so much to me to get a letter from her.”

Another inmate has a two-year old daughter who is with foster parents and he declared that his wish would be to hear his daughter on the phone. I told him that she wouldn’t be able to say much at the age of two, and he replied, “I just want to hear the sound of her voice.”

As I read these essays, I am reminded that we never lose our deep basic need to connect with soulfulness of each other’s heart. Each of us has a story to tell and we are traveling our personal road of transformation. Taking part in another’s dream or conflict or unresolved past is a deeper way of listening, a deeper way of being present. The reward for such deep listening is the incredible honor of witnessing a living model of human courage and then finding comfort and healing in the surprise that our stories are really the same.

Listening to another’s story somehow gives us the strength of example to carry on, as well as showing us aspects of ourselves we can’t easily see. Listening to the stories of others and the cries of their hearts is a kind of water that breaks the fever of our isolation. If we listen closely enough, we are soothed into remembering our common name.

I believe that when we express our truth, it releases light and warmth. I believe it is the way our spirit shines. These essay writers are my medicine. And I am theirs. We are members of a broken whole. And we will heal…a stitch, a song, a cry at a time.