October 2024 | Restorative Justice—Dipping into Our Humanity
Dear friends,
This newsletter is entering its ninth year. Thank you for your interest and support! It’s great to receive your feedback, even hearing that some of the links last month didn’t work. (Thank you, Linton!) And it’s even better receiving your photos, pictures of your artwork, your thoughts and feelings, musings, and writing.
I’d also like to acknowledge the many people who have agreed to be interviewed during these years. It often takes courage to share one’s story. Naturally, feelings of being vulnerable arise. In the past year, some interviews that come to mind are Valerie Dean, Fran Carbonaro, Saul Herrera, and Aaron Hargrove. Looking further back, Kay Crista (December 2022), Biologist Ellen (September 2019), and Kiley Clark on Farming—A Black Perspective (August 2019).
This month, as promised, we take a brief journey into the field of Restorative Justice.
Restorative Justice—Dipping into Our Humanity
You’ll find three links to short videos (between 4 and 8 minutes) from this field, that I find deeply moving and hope you might, too.
The paragraph below is taken from the Guiding Rage into Power site and there’s a powerful video on their Home page.
This Restorative Justice movement transcends the escalating “fear of the other” in our society, where change, hope, and new light are needed. Finding new ways to do prison represents one of the greatest social experiments in American history: the radical transformation of a nation that currently incarcerates its citizens in unprecedented numbers, into a nation that stands for a second chance, redemption, and personal evolution. We hold it as vital, for the survival of our society in general, that we transform the institutionalization of fear and denial that our current prison system represents. Rather than merely hiding the shadow side of our society, our prisons can become beacons of light that guide us into healing the trance of denial of our common need for belonging. Perhaps it is only through this new and invigorated vision of justice that we can rediscover our mutuality and our need to both protect and care for that which we hold in common.
The Healing Power of Forgiveness: Releasing Shame and Finding Inner Peace
I was a little nervous when I went to this event last February. Firstly, I had never been to the Shomrei Torah Temple in Santa Rosa, California, and didn’t think I’d know anyone there. Secondly, I thought the subject matter might well be triggering.
My anxiety was eased by the warmth of the greeting and the atmosphere, and the generous spread prepared for people to help themselves. Once seated, we were asked to say hello to our neighbors, and the organizers, clearly trauma-informed, encouraged anyone whose nervous system was aroused to feel free to get up and leave or to let them know. I found all six presenters quite inspiring. Each of them had undergone tremendous suffering before ‘finding themselves’ by degrees, and deciding to contribute to giving others opportunities to learn and change.
Presenters:
- Melissa Caseri, (top left) whose father was a victim of violence when she was seven. By embracing forgiveness, she liberated herself from years of anger, shame, and pain.
- Marylyn Tesconi, (second row) is a survivor of a sex crime committed over fifty years ago. She has shared her story both in and outside of prisons.
- Anthony Ammons Jr., (top row, middle) went to prison at age 16 to serve a life sentence. Since his release, he has been a major contributor to the re-entry community and prison reform movement.
- Miguel Quezada (top row) is the Co-Founder and Co-Director of Mend Collective. Through his experience of two decades of incarceration, he is dedicated to healing cycles of violence through dialogue.
- Rafael Cuevas, (second-row, middle) while serving a life sentence for murder sought out a path toward redemption. Since his release, he has worked directly with incarcerated individuals and survivors of crime.
- Damon Cooke, (second row) was sentenced to life and his experience seeing the same men return to prison encouraged him to develop the Uncuffed Project to help break the recidivism cycle.
At least three of the presenters mentioned the GRIP (Guiding Rage into Power) Training Institute. I invite you to also visit their What We Do page from which the paragraph below is taken.
Most incarcerated people have experienced extraordinary abuse, violence, and trauma in their early lives. The culture of GRIP honors and acknowledges the humanity of all participants, as well as the unique path that each student takes to build resilience and heal their own particular wounds. It is only through this kind of compassionate and restorative approach that true accountability and empathy emerge.
Miguel Quezada is a co-founder and co-director of The Mend Collaborative. Its programs include Victim Offender Dialogues, Surrogate Restorative Justice Circles, and Days of Healing in the community and inside prison for survivors and people responsible for harm.
Damon Cooke is the co-founder and CEO of The Uncuffed Project which works to break the recidivism cycle. There’s a very interesting documentary about him and his fight to be released from prison. I found him to be super-bright and motivated to make a difference with a no-nonsense approach to his work whether dealing with youth, incarcerated people, or the small group we were in for twenty minutes.
There are many restorative justice movements and projects in California. This is just a subjective dip into the terrain. Much can likely be discovered online close to your home.
I’d like to give a shout-out for the San Francisco Bay Area’s Project Avary which does incredible work supporting children of incarcerated parents. You’ll find a short video on their Home page. Diana Badger, this newsletter’s editor, shares her experience working with Project Avary, and with the Insight Garden Program (IGP) at San Quentin prison. They, too, have a wonderful video (8 minutes) on their Home page.
Some words from Diana on her experiences with Insight Garden Program, and Project Avary.
Having completed a year-long counseling training in 2013, I’d been told that working in prisons might be a vehicle through which I could apply my counseling skills. When I learned the following year that a high school classmate of mine, Beth Waitkus, was running the Insight Garden Program at San Quentin, I reached out to see if I might join the weekly class as a guest facilitator. (I had already been co-facilitating a meditation group at a local women’s homeless shelter for a few years.)
Luck had it that the day I visited the prison, there was also a member of a consultant firm present whom Beth had hired to further develop the curriculum she’d created and built over 12 years. The year-long curriculum of weekly 2-hour classes, which teaches inner and well as outer gardening, was based on a graduate program in Organizational Management she had completed at Pepperdine University. The program had exposed her to progressive systems thinkers such as Fritjof Capra, Joanna Macy, and Meg Wheatley, all of whose ideas were in the curriculum, with the former two being physically present on occasion at the prison group, or at fundraisers.
The program had been birthed with the support of the influential Jacques Verduin, who founded the above-mentioned GRIP program (among many others) at San Quentin. Since its inception Beth had orchestrated the creation of two impressive gardens—a large landscaped garden with gravel paths, roses, and other flowering shrubs, and many bee- and butterfly-attracting California native plants; and a six-bed vegetable garden at the far end of the prison grounds. It was always exciting to visit these gardens with the classmates, to feel their connection to the plants and the winged ones, and to share our enthusiasm and knowledge with them.
When I joined the program, Beth was working on her vision to ground into official form the program that had until then consisted mostly of her loosely rendered session notes, so that it could be replicated at other prisons around California and the country. (The program now operates at 11 prisons in California, and I believe several other prisons around the US – that was the case when I left the program about seven years ago.) In the beginning, I received some helpful trainings in curriculum development from the consultant group, and wrote up a number of the lessons on topics I was familiar with, such as permaculture and gardening. Each lesson was 6-7 pages, as it included experiential and didactic components, with detailed facilitator scripting. One of several of my structural contributions to the lesson plans was to make sure there was a meditation practice at the start of each group, as well as a gratitude practice at the end. After a number of months, Beth let go of the consultant group and appointed me as Curriculum Manager/Designer, as she said she felt I understood the program better than any of the other designer/developers.
For the next 2-3 years I worked on the curriculum and also participated as a co-facilitator in the groups of men who had voluntarily signed up for the Insight Garden Program (IGP). Often there were 2-3 facilitators, and sometimes guests from the community. At times, it was nerve-wracking going through the intensive security process to get to each class, even after having done a day-long facilitator onboarding workshop, which had to be redone each year. We had to arrive almost two hours before the class began in order to park in the general lot, go through an initial checkpoint, and then from there, carpool down in fewer cars to another lot outside the facility where the class took place. Often there were at least facilitators, and frequently, multiple guests from the community. Security at the lower checkpoint was like at an airport, and also there were strict guidelines about what one could and couldn’t wear, including multiple verboten colors, no shoulder or legs exposure for women—so there was always a bit of concern that one would be turned away because of one’s clothes. Once inside, we would walk alongside the ‘yard’, with guys roaming about and eyeing us as we filed down the path towards the chapel, which was just a simple classroom where the class took place. I soon got used to this somewhat tense moment, as once inside the class, it was always a rewarding experience.
The group of about 20 men (which changed periodically) who joined the class were self-selecting seekers of growth and healing. It was a beautiful experience to sit in circle, and to do small breakout group exercises with such a deeply engaged population. I made a few strong connections with the guys, and was sad when they moved on, whether to a different prison facility because of an unfortunate encounter with the guards, or because it was time to be released. Some, or even many, of these folks were wise beings and took their inner work very seriously. I never felt a shred of anxiety being in the room with them, but rather so grateful to be able to work with such a receptive group. My only anxiety was with the guards and the security process, where there was an air of intensity.
We spent quite a bit of time outside at the gardens, but more time in the classroom itself, as there was a lot to cover. Once, it so happened that near the end of the class, one of the guest facilitators had shared a very moving Rumi poem, which was shortly followed by an announcement of the lockdown of the whole prison, due to some trouble from another quarter. This meant we facilitators were not allowed to leave at the appointed time. We were kept ‘locked down’ ourselves in the room with the guys for another 90 minutes beyond the 2-hour class, which was just a wee taste of what it might be like to be held there against one’s will. Not comfortable, but thankfully we were riding on the waves of the powerful Rumi emanation!
Another highlight of the groups was getting to know the array of guests and regular facilitators. One amazing day we were joined by a group of older women from the Marin County Garden Club. A couple of them rode with me down to the lower prison lot, and we got to chatting about garden clubs. I mentioned that my mother had been the recipient of a national Garden Club of America trophy in her 80s, for her many years of service, and it turned out this woman riding with me was on the national board of those who decide on the award recipient each year. That was an amazing convergence of my roots as the child of avid gardeners, and this powerful application of gardening knowledge to personal healing for inmates.
Another time, I carpooled with a Black man who’d been in prison for many years himself, but who was now on the outside doing good work. He told me that San Quentin was known as the “Esalen Institute” of prisons, because of its impressive selection of educational, therapeutic, healing, and personal growth programs, along with an array of professional skills programs, one of which included a popular computer coding class that some of the guys in IGP were enthusiastically taking, with the promise of getting a job placement once on the outside.
Yet another time, I chatted with a guest who was a lawyer who had left her work as a public defender, having grown frustrated over the ‘rigged deck’ she experienced in the courts. She was now trying to make more of a difference by helping the incarcerated with programs to help them get on their feet after leaving prison. Much support is needed in this realm, she stressed.
A year or two after I’d moved on from my work with IGP, I was approached by Project Avary to develop a therapeutic groups curriculum for San Francisco City Schools middle and high school students with an incarcerated parent. Project Avary’s primary work is leading week-long summer camps and school-year weekend trips out in beautiful natural settings outdoors, which help the kids with parents in prison find a place of community, belonging, and acceptance.
This curriculum I developed was for a 12-week series of school support groups, as well as a day-long training for school counselors on how to apply the curriculum. This too was a very meaningful pursuit that I felt blessed to be called to, although I did not myself have a lot of personal interaction with the students.
My daughter, however, became a camp counselor for Project Avary for four years in her high school/college years (and another year more recently), and found it to be a deeply moving experience (hence her returning for five years!). Clearly, it runs in the family, this thread of finding deep meaning in serving those who are underserved by society. And of course, we all have our own healing work to do, so in truth, we heal and teach each other in these types of settings.
Psalm
How could a day become a psalm?
My friend and I rescued a spider
one of those frail, long-legged,
clinging to a spidery web
in the bathtub and now in the garden.
A neighbor returned from a visit
to family in Chile,
delayed for hours, no energy
for shopping. I left a bowl of eggs
by the door and called her.
I listened to friends today, their joys and
sorrows, through visits on the phone.
I paused by the elderly rose trees,
touched the gnarled bark, knowing
the heartwood was long gone,
but the heart was in the roses,
still blooming.
The terrible wars, the dangers
threatening the world,
seemed worse today
and yet,
and yet, here was the world also,
here was the inviolable
ancient holiness so ordinary,
so vulnerable,
still singing.
– Gail Onion
ANNOUNCEMENTS
Mamos Puja
Dear Friends,
This is just to let you know about the dates for this year’s Mamos Puja at Jangchub Jong Monastic Institute in Himachal Pradesh in India.
The puja will be held on October 19th, 20th, and 21st and again will be a “Grand” puja.
I do hope you might be able to join us in prayer for our precious and beloved Mother Earth and all beings (human and more than human) sometime during those days. (The final day is the most auspicious.) Also, if you feel to support the puja with funds that would be warmly received.
For more information about the puja:
https://dianebarker.net/mamos.php
With much love from Jangchub Jong,
Diane
Stories for a Living Future
A Podcast with Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
Epilogue: The Nature of Divine Light
In this episode, Llewellyn shares how “The nature of the light which I have described in these recent podcasts is that it comes direct from the Source, from the undifferentiated Essence. It awakens us to an awareness of the oneness and multiplicity of creation, and the primal need for praise and thanksgiving. With this light, we can return to the wonder of the first day—to the song of creation that is alive in the love within our hearts.”
Directed by Adam Loften and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee
This heartfelt story follows Kaylanee Mam back to her roots, both family and Cambodian roots. Her openness provides a doorway to our own connecting with self and Earth.
Emergence Magazine is also screening three films sharing stories of what it means to reawaken and hold love for the living world as the places we call home are changed by ecological destruction and irreversible loss. In The Nightingale’s Song, British folk singer Sam Lee joins the nightingale in song as development threatens it with extinction in the UK. Aloha ‘Āina explores a love for and of the land embodied by Native Hawaiian poet Jamaica Osorio as she fights to protect the sacred Mauna Kea from the construction of a thirty-meter telescope. And The Last Ice Age journeys with Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason to the melting Vatnajökull glacier as he searches for the myths large enough to hold the vastness of the climate crisis.
American Friends of Combatants for Peace
No doubt you read or hear about the horrific events occurring daily in Gaza, the West Bank, and now in Lebanon. “Combatants for Peace,” is one organization of Israelis and Palestinians working daily to mitigate the suffering of people under assault in these areas.
Here is one of two “letters” I received at the beginning of September.
Receive the Earth-Love Newsletter, event invitations, and always a poem.