JAIL

I think so much about powerlessness, the spiritual kind, but the other day I was reminded of my experience with another kind of powerlessness. Many years ago my ex-husband and I drove from Los Angeles to Mexico City, then north again heading for New York. We were stopped at the border, the officers searched the car and found a joint in a box of typewriter paper we had forgotten about. We had some more hidden away. It was enough to get us arrested and taken to jail.
     As if in a movie, I heard the barred door close behind me and the key turn in the lock. I wanted to shout, "Hey, it's me, a nice Jewish girl from New York!" But I knew there was no appeal. They didn't care who I thought I was; to them, I had been in a car that had marijuana and that was that. 
     There were two other women in the holding cell, a Mexican prostitute and a small nervous Anglo who had passed some bad checks. I sat on a bunk, stunned by what had happened. For the first time, I, a politico in the Sixties, slowly began to be grateful for the rule of law. If the men who turned the key hadn't obeyed the law, I could have been locked away forever. But there was a process, a routine that jailers and officers and the courts all choose to obey, so that after two days we got out on bail. They dropped the charges against me and my ex-husband eventually got a suspended sentence. When we were released the first thing I did was throw away the dress I'd been wearing; I knew cleaning it wouldn't get the smell of jail out of it.
     That sense of powerlessness in jail, of a shocking destabilization, effected me more than I knew. In the next few years, I had a series of prison dreams, one in the Catacombs, another in a concentration camp and a strange one in which I was locked into something like a bamboo bird cage. I began to be phobic about being hemmed in, unable to get out of wherever I was. It took unexpected forms; years later, when I got off the ferry on Martha's Vineyard, I had a couple of hours of anxiety - there was no way off the island except on ferries keeping to a schedule. I couldn't leave whenever I wanted.
     The fact that I had experienced the jail kind of powerlessness in part led me an interest in prison memoirs, stories of people who found a way to be free in the most unfree of circumstances. Many of them were stories of spiritual awakening, even for the ones who had no religion. These people found a way to maintain their identity and integrity.They came to terms. 
     I see I've come full circle. The powerlessness I knew in jail was all about helplessness, robbed of autonomy. That led me to seek out stories about a similar experience, and that in turn led me to my own spiritual awakening, to a sure sense of my own always possible freedom, an inner autonomy no one can take away from me, no matter what. Full circle. One more time, coming a great distance in order to begin. 
     

SURVIVAL

I'm fascinated by stories of people who find spiritual freedom in the most unfree of circumstances.  For a while, I read everything I could find - books by concentration camp survivors, prison memoirs, stories of people who had survived the imprisonment of poverty and disease. I was looking for examples of survival; I needed to know that it's always possible to emerge out of despair into a sense of freedom  My actual circumstances were nowhere near as dire as those of the men and women I was reading about.  I had food and shelter and freedom of motion. But I felt myself imprisoned by fear and self-loathing and the particular kind of hopelessness that told me nothing good could ever come. 
     I needed to know that there is always the possibility of getting. I was desperate to feel that possibility, to believe there was something that would help me leave depression and fear behind. I wanted to believe that my human spirit, like the spirits of the people I read about, could transcend suffering and let go of fear. 
     I know now from direct experience what that letting go feels like. When suffering cuts deep enough, the body and the spirit must make a choice - either to go under and face annihilation, or to let loose the survival instinct that's in all of us. It's that instinct which finds a way out of suffering and moves us toward the solace we seek, even if we don't understand it and have no faith at all. Spirit wants expansion and freedom. It wants to be set on fire. Strike a match and watch the light grow. Survive.