Belonging Where We Are

by Troy Chapman

Do you belong in the life you’re living? Do you feel that you belong? These may seem like odd questions but I think many of us often do not feel a sense of belonging where we are. If I’m not careful, I can easily lose this sense here in prison, where the place is designed to be somebody else’s world.

But this isn’t unique to prison. Belongingness isn’t something that’s nurtured in commercial culture. For one thing, it’s often easily misunderstood for fitting in and conforming. But these are by no means the same things. Indeed, the level of fitting in and conforming seen in any group of people is an inverse indicator of the level of geniune belonging. People who feel a genuine sense of belonging feel free to engage in self expression. Where the sense of belonging is absent, people feel pushed more toward the extremes of conformity and rebellion, the latter of which is often mistaken for self-expression, but is really just reverse conformity.

So what is belonging if it’s not fitting in?

It seems to me there are different answers to this question. Belonging is in part a sense of “rightness,” right now. When I’m belonging, things may not be perfect but I feel that my life is happening right now, as opposed to feeling I’m in some strange waiting room, tapping my foot, waiting for my life to begin.

There’s also belonging to our own time and place. I have at times felt like I should have been born a century ago — that I belong to a different time and place. This might seem harmless enough, but I’ve realized it brings on a sense of not belonging where I am and not respecting my life by being present in my time and culture as it is. So another part of belonging is feeling like we are living not only here but now.

Right next to this is a sense that our station in life is right, as well. This doesn’t mean locking ourselves into our current station forever, but simply acknowledging that it’s not some cosmic error that we are a bus driver, teacher, cop, nurse, stay-at-home mom, prisoner/writer and so on. We may well belong somewhere else in the future, but right now, in this moment, we belong where we are. To embrace this is to give ourselves fully to our own lives — i.e., to belong to our own lives.

The same can be said about our chronological ages. Our culture works incessantly to tell us it’s infinitely preferable to be 20 years old with perfect bodies and all our choices still laid out before us. If that sounds crazy, that’s because it is. But we often feel that this head of gray hair, this bad eyesight, the aches in our joints are an accident of some sort and we spend endless resources of time, money and mental energy trying to correct them. But again, these changes are no mistake. Whether we are young, middle-aged or old, we are precisely where we’re supposed to be.

Another aspect of belonging is having a sense that our take on life is necessary and legitimate. One of the things we teach in our weekly ethics group here is that each of us sits on a slightly different location around the wheel of life. As a result, we all see things from a slightly different perspective and every perspective is necessary for humankind to know the “truth.” Thus to delegitimize, or allow someone to delegitimize, another’s perspective is an act of violence to the truth. So too is giving up our own perspective and adopting someone else’s. We should never apologize for nor be ashamed of our truth but rather we should give ourselves to it and belong to it as it belongs to us. (And owning our truth in this way means not holding fast to it as a rigid and unchanging thing, but being in dialogue with it, being open to its unfolding and evolution.)

And I guess this is the last thing I’ll say about belonging for now: it’s something we have to choose to do. Others can invite us to belong, they can make a place for us, but they can’t give us a sense of belonging, which means of course that they can’t take it away, either. They can and will try to displace us in various ways and for various reasons but when we decide that we belong where we are, there’s not really much anyone can do about it.

It does take an effort — again and again — to claim and maintain belonging, but the alternative is to live our lives always in the wrong time, the wrong place, the wrong age and so on. It is to be refugees in our own lives and that’s a lot more work than the effort demanded to belong.

Dear Friends,

Maryann has been sending me all the wonderful letters you’ve been writing to Governor Granholm and the Parole and Commutations Board on my behalf. I must say, you have convinced me — I really am amazing.

OK, I resort to humor because I’m embarrassed by the riches of your friendship and can’t find words to say how thankful and humbled I am by the fact that you are willing to speak out for me as you have and by the unfailing eloquence of every letter I’ve read. So thank you once again for your support — both moral and actual.

In other news, the ethics group here has been approved as an official Department of Corrections group. Up to this point, we have functioned with local approval as basically a class/workshop on ethics. This was amazingly fruitful but now we’re able to have more meeting space — twice a week — and a cabinet to keep our books, records, etc. We’re using our second weekly meeting as a video discussion group so if any of you see any videos you think will suit us, send us the name and where we can find them.

I also want to say that if anyone wants to send a message to the group to encourage the men in it, we would love to hear from you. You can email it via Maryann or send it to me via snail mail and I’ll read it to the group. Many of the men have no contact outside prison and would appreciate any word.

Lately this has been my full-time job — working to organize things here, to create a starter kit for other prisons (or anyone) to use to start an ethics group, and deciding how to best spend the extra meeting time. We already have one request from a prison in Minnesota and I’m working directly with a prisoner there to start a project. I will keep you posted on this.

Well, thank you again for your letters, your love and your support. You are all invaluable to me and to Maryann. You’re true Friends.

Troy

The Cloth of Wholeness

by Troy Chapman

There is a curtain that stands between me and any violence I might do to others. This curtain is my own integrity and in order to violate any lifeform I must first tear a hole in the fabric of my own wholeness. There is no other way to accomplish violence. One cannot go under, over or around the curtain, but only through it.

We know that violence done to us tears the fabric of our integrity, but we haven’t yet come to the other side of this truth: that violence done by us has the same effect.

I’m not talking about karma or anything like that here, where eventually our actions will come back around to us. The harm done to our own integrity must be done before we can do violence to others, because all violence in the world is done through the curtain of our own integrity. If we understand that violence is “any assault on or violation of integrity in the world around us,” we begin to see the seriousness of what I’m saying here.

Is vicious gossip an assault on someone’s integrity? If so, it is violence and if it’s violence I must tear a hole in the fabric of my own integrity in order to do it. This is true also of ill-will, apathy, mean-spiritedness. Of any act of belittlement or slighting of another, of any disrespect. Something as seemingly insignificant as littering is an assault on the integrity of the ecosystem. As such it is a form of violence. So we not only have to roll down our car window to throw out garbage, we also have to punch a hole in our own integrity.

Integrity is all around us. There’s personal integrity, community integrity, ecological or natural integrity, and the integrity of life itself. Our common definition of violence covers only assaults on the physical integrity of people. But if we ever want to get out of the cycles of violence and sickness that we’re caught in, we must expand this definition as I’ve done above to include any assault on integrity in our world.

One part of us knows this already. To tell a child he or she is stupid and won’t amount to anything is an act of violence, though no physical harm is done. It’s violence to treat people with contempt or to abuse those over whom we have power; to reduce people economically, to impoverish them so we can take more than we need.

By this standard our world is saturated in violence and we may be tempted to say the standard is too high, but is it? Or is our current woefully inadequate definition of violence just a game we’re playing with the truth so we don’t have to look at this truth head-on?

If so, it’s a game we’re playing with our own lives and with our own well-being. It’s a game based on the utterly self-destructive falsehood that we can do violence without harming ourselves. Once we understand the truth that all violence shreds our own integrity, we want out of this game. We want to identify all violence clearly and step away from it.

Wholeness is one cloth. Integrity in us and integrity in the world around us are two folds in this single cloth. There’s no such thing as “my wholeness” and “your wholeness,” “my soundness and well-being” as distinct from “your soundness and well-being.” These things are bound up together and when we serve one we serve the other one. Undermine one and we undermine the other.

And all things fall into these two categories: they either serve integrity or they undermine it. If I want to be well and a light in the world, I must remember that the curtain of my own integrity stands between me and the world, and only that which serves integrity can pass through this curtain without tearing it. I must remember that all things done by the self are done first to the self.

Where the Temple Is

by Troy Chapman

A woman went looking for God. Instead she met a man and fell in love. They spent their lives together, raised and loved their children, suffered together, shared joy and sorrow, prosperity and want, good times and bad. Through the years they built community, served the poor, the elderly, and the downtrodden with open hearts.

In old age, the woman said to herself, “I’ve led a good life. My only regret is that I abandoned my search for God — that I had to choose between that life and the one I eventually led.”

When she died and her spirit arrived in heaven, she confessed this regret to God. God said, “What are you talking about? You went looking for me and found love. Don’t you know that this is my face? What you thought was a distraction from me — the mundane and ordinary details of your life — has always been your temple. Did you honor this temple?”

A Letter-Writing Campaign

I have posted information at Friends of Troy about a letter-writing campaign I am starting to protest the Michigan Parole Board and Governor Jennifer Granholm's decision to deny Troy's request for commutation of his sentence.

Thanks,
Maryann

4-22-09

I received a letter from the governor’s office reading:

The parole board has completed its review of your self-initiated application for pardon or commutation of sentence and forwarded its determination to the governor. Based on the parole board’s recommendation the governor has denied your application.

I’m not sure what they’d want me to do to increase my chances. I thought about writing the governor’s office with this question, but will run it by our lawyer John first.

As to how I feel? Well, certainly disappointed. Dispirited is probably a more accurate description. Determined also, though, to keep living to what I hold true.

We will file again with them once the legal time limit has passed. Meanwhile, I will try to rubberize myself so I can bounce. We’ll discuss where to go next. I need to do the same with my personal work as I’ve been sort of floating on that as I’ve been awaiting the decision.

I want to thank you all for your prayers and support. Never underestimate what that means to me and Maryann and know that it makes a world of difference.

Other than that, it’s rainy and cold here today and for the next few days. Weather to match this mood, I guess. Of course, to continue this metaphor, it is spring, and after the rain, sun and warmer days and renewal will come. Are coming, even now. More later.

—Troy

Journal Entries

by Troy Chapman

4/19/09
It’s a Sunday morning and the prison is quiet. Even the gulls, which are usually staging riots outside my window at this time of day, seem to be off somewhere else — seagull church, maybe. It’s rare to hear nothing here, even for short periods of time.

Me and my bunkie Steve just had BBQ tuna crackers for breakfast. This is a recipe from our neighbor, Scott. A pouch of tuna, salad dressing, BBQ sauce, crushed BBQ corn chips (which are so hot you can’t eat them any other way) and maybe some pickle all chopped up in a bowl together and served on crackers. Mmm, mmm, as Grandpa Jones would say. Actually, it’s not too bad and the whole thing only costs about two dollars and feeds two (lightly).

Seagulls are probably not the first thing you think of when you think about the Upper Peninsula of Michigan but, at least in this area, we have tons of them. They’re ringbills from the nearby lakes. During the spring/summer/fall months we have huge flocks of them here at the prison. They come for the garbage (and the guys who can’t resist feeding them even though it’s against the rules). They’re loud and obnoxious but I don’t mind them. Some people hate them because they’re so loud, which always makes me smile, considering how much a group of them squawking sounds like one of our overcrowded dayrooms, especially on sports night.

Anyway, they disappear in winter but I think I read that they don’t migrate south. They just go to islands in the lakes — although I don’t know why that would be better than here. Maybe it’s just too much trouble to fly to the prison in winter because most of the food is buried in snow. I need to read up on them to find out what they’re up to. They might be plotting to overthrow the human government for all I know and probably ought to be looked into.


4/15/09
“It is every man’s duty to put back into the world at least the equivalent of what he takes out of it.” —Albert Einstein.

What a powerful sentiment. At first, it looks like a simple calculation — instead of thinking solely about what we can get, we ought to think about giving something back. But that’s not what he’s saying. He’s saying we have the duty to put back at least the equivalent of what we take.

What have I taken from the world? Here’s another way to ask that question: What did I bring here with me? Since that answer to that is “nothing,” the answer to the question of what I’ve taken out must be “everything.”

The very flesh and bone that comprises my body belongs not to me but to the earth. The web of my thoughts and my consciousness is woven by electrical impulses that I have “taken from the world.” The electricity doesn’t belong to me. In fact, if I want to so much as scratch my own foot, I have to draw on this same electricity to send a signal from my brain to my arm. Did I bring this electricity with me into the world?

When we really get a handle on how little we own or have truly earned here, we get a sense of how much we really owe back for the gift of being here. We see that the duty Einstein speaks of is a duty to put all of ourselves back into the world. The only real question is whether we’re willing to accept this duty.

I’m trying to understand that I owe my self to the world.

The 4-to-1 Rule

by Troy Chapman

Have you ever noticed that evil seems to have more influence on us than good does? Not only that, but we focus more on it as well. If 100 guys get out of prison and 99 of them go on to become paragons of decency and integrity and one of them commits a new crime, it will be the re-offender you hear about on the evening news. We know the news is negative, but it’s not just the news that’s negative. The same thing happens inside our own heads. In fact, the news is just a reflection of our mental process on this point. Someone can tell me half a dozen good things about myself and one bad thing, and it’s the bad thing that will stick with me, thumping around in my head like a bowling ball in a clothes dryer while the praise makes about as much noise as a silk stocking.

Another manifestation of this is that things fall apart more easily than they stay together. It takes work to keep things together whereas all it takes to make them fall apart is to do nothing. This is true whether we’re talking about our own bodies or our relationships and social well-being. This can be frustrating for anyone trying to build, well, pretty much anything.

Enter the 4-to-1 Rule. I’m loosely calculating that rottenness and evil has roughly four times as much influence on us as does good. In other words, we pay four times as much attention to it and it’s about four times as easy to do, or to allow to happen, in our lives than is goodness. If this is true, there’s only one thing to do: Increase the energy we expend on goodness by at least a factor of four. This is the 4-to-1 Rule.

Every time I hear something bad about someone, I’m going to come up with at least four good things about them and repeat them to myself and others. Or I will comb my mind for negative thoughts and beliefs and whenever I locate one I will stack four positive beliefs or observations around it — splash it with some good news like a priest at an exorcism and watch it hiss. I will demand four times as much evidence for evil in the future as I demand for good. If someone does me wrong I will assume it to be an aberration. If they do it again, I’ll assume it again. And again. And again. After four times I’ll think about getting cynical.

Henceforth I will go through life assuming that goodness needs four times as much attention and maintenance as evil. And once I assume that, I won’t be upset when it proves to be true. I won’t feel cheated if I already know and agree to the price. I’ll simply acknowledge that — as with growing a garden — if I want the fruit I have to put in the work. If I want a weed patch, I can just sit on the porch.

The Bible tells us to “overcome evil with good,” and I’ve always wondered, if that’s how it’s supposed to be, then why is good so, well, wimpy? Then I realized it’s not good that’s wimpy, it’s my application of it. And when I’m called to get off my bottom and do more work, I cry like a baby. “Why is life so hard? Why can’t I just sort of think a good thought and have that be enough to change the world?” So for me, the 4-to-1 Rule is an Anti-Whining Ordinance. I’m going to make a serious effort to stop complaining (even inwardly) and to be optimistic (i.e., have faith that the arc of the universe bends toward justice, as Martin Luther King, Jr., said) and simply accept that this is the way things are. Goodness takes work — like anything else worth pursuing. With the 4-to-1 Rule, I know exactly how much, so I can’t cry and claim I didn’t know it was going to be this hard.

Journal Entries

Note from Maryann: I visited Troy last week and he gave me a couple of journal entries to post. They’re a little outdated now, but we’re going to catch up. He’d like to start posting short reflections in a journal sort of style, coming out of his daily life.

Troy is doing very well and we had a very nice visit. On the way up to see him, I stopped in Ann Arbor, at the University of Michigan. The university has a prison creative arts program which last year solicited prisoner creative writing. Troy submitted three poems that made it into the first “On Words: Michigan Review of Prisoner Creative Writing.” I went to the university on March 26 because they were hosting an event featuring the editors and formerly incarcerated writers reading selections from the book. The guest editor, Joseph Bathanti, named Troy’s poem “The Knitting Birds” as first honorable mention. Two of Troy’s poems were read, “The Knitting Birds” and “The Prodigal.” (The third that was published, “Awakening,” was first published here.) There were about 1,000 entries and only 30+ writers made it into the book. As Bathanti said in naming his choices for winning entries and honorable mentions, when you get to the level of the writing published in the book, they are all winners, and that is so true, but I have to admit I was proud as a mama bear to be there and see the little extra attention Troy’s poetry got.

Here are the journal entries. More to come.

3-20-09
First day of spring — which I didn’t know until one of my cell mates mentioned it this morning. Of course, actual spring starts when it feels like starting so I pay more attention to that than to the official date. That hasn’t happened here yet in any real way. Still lots of snow on the ground but it’s slowly melting and some brown patches are starting to show up like old friends who’ve been away too long. The birds love these patches as much as I do. To them they’re like a buffet and they’re down there with their little heads bobbing happily, snatching up morsels of food.

I feel like I’ve been drifting for awhile, but I know that this feeling is partly due to cabin fever and wanting winter to end. Hopefully, as days get warmer I’ll experience a thawing of energy to match the outer thaw. I’m sure I will. I wish I would just remember the cyclical nature of these things — of all things, really — and not get so tense when I’m in the down cycle.

3-22-09
9:30 Sunday morning: I’m sitting here thinking I should do something useful, which I haven’t done for a few days. Had our ethics group meeting last night. The topic was our map of reality and how this affects our values. Good discussion. I’m advocating just being aware that we have a map of reality and that all kinds of things get written on it by all kinds of people. It’s good to ask ourselves regularly whether we want a certain piece of information on our map or not. To set up some kind of filter. Because if we don’t even know we have a map, or if we never think about it, there’s basically no filter. Everyone’s writing on our map of reality all the time and we end up with a confused bunch of mumbo-jumbo that doesn’t represent the world very well. The essence of “unconsciousness” is to not filter the content and process of our own mind and worldview.

I lived that way the first half of my life. It’s like getting in a car, putting it in gear, then closing your eyes and pushing the accelerator to the floor and hoping you don’t crash. We had a good talk about it in the class.

I guess I’m busy now erasing some errors off my map of reality, such as: I need to figure it all out or nothing else I do matters. Who wrote that on my map? Gimme the WhiteOut.

—Troy Chapman

Effort, Energy, and Life Block

By Troy Chapman

You’ve heard about writer’s block, that mysterious condition
that paralyses writers and renders wordsmiths wordless. I
thought I had it once but when I looked more closely I realized it wasn’t just my writing that had come to a stop, it was my whole life. I didn’t have writer’s block, I had life block. Maybe you’re familiar with it.

It’s that frustrating state where all the various rivers of energy running through your life just suddenly begin to dry up and you’re out there in your little rowboat, scraping bottom, and rocking back and forth to get over one sand bar after another. You lose your momentum, your mojo.

That’s where I’ve been lately — trying to row my boat through puddles and hoping for rain. That gets old quick so I did what any self-respecting shade-tree philosopher would do: I dragged my boat up on the grass, parked my butt on the bank, and began to ponder the process.

I wondered where the water went. How come one minute I’m engaged, planning, taking action, and the next I’m sitting slack-jawed and mush-minded and unable to care about anything except what’s up next on TV? And, more pertinently, what can I do about it?

I read once that effort creates energy. I took it to mean that when I sit around saying, “I would do X, Y, and Z if I had the energy,” I should be saying, “I would have the energy if I did X, Y, and Z.” Energy doesn’t precede action, but follows it. Start going for walks when you have no energy and pretty soon you’ll start having the energy to go for walks. Sit around waiting until you “feel like it” and you’ll wait forever.

We think of sitting still as non-action, but it’s actually an action in itself. It demands effort and that effort creates energy. It’s only after the sitting-still energy gets created that sitting still becomes easy. I think of this as the momentum of inertia. The longer I sit still the more momentum my doing nothing gains, until after a while it seems to take enormous energy to get moving again. Yet, as soon as I make an effort to act (even if it doesn’t amount to action) I begin creating energy in that direction. Eventually that energy floats my boat, so to speak.

So, the last few days I’ve made an effort to write and get some other things done in my life. I couldn’t write but I still sat for a while every day with my paper and pen. Then I rearranged my bulletin board, cleaned house, and took a walk, knowing that if I could break up my life block my writer’s block would soon follow. Then today I wrote on my to-do list: Write blog entry.

I made an effort and it didn’t work. I made another and with the energy left over from the first effort, here I am. I’m still dragging my boat from one puddle to the next but I can hear the low rumble of thunder in the distance and feel the electricity in the air. I think the rain’s coming if I can continue my little dance of effort. Meanwhile, you’ll have to excuse me while I go mark “Write blog entry” off my list.