Dali Lama, All In One Person

As I was going to visit someone at the House of Corrections tonight I stopped to get some gas at my local CITGO gas station. As I was pumping my gas I observed a man leaving the food store at the station saying something out loud about people having a problem because they pray to God for the nation. What struck me first was that it looked like he was talking out loud to himself, and then I realized that he was talking on the phone with a Bluetooth ear piece. Second I noticed his words sounding negative about prayer and thought of my post on Law of Nature and Prayer last night.

I was also reminded of last night’s Diary of the Worm post and the www.nonviolentcow.org web site by two public radio talk shows I heard parts of while riding around in the car this morning. One was on research on the value of meditation for good health and reducing stress, by a UW-Madison professor Richard Davidson. As I have said many times in this journal, this is something I know but often do not practice. Maybe now days when you can keep busy, even while walking to your car, by cell phones and other devices, time for meditation and quiet is not very popular. I think meditation, mindfulness, prayer or whatever you call it is essential to nonviolence.

The other public radio show I heard this morning, on another public radio channel we receive, was an interview with Michael Pollan. He was the guy who proposed the White House Farmer vote, in which a woman from Troy Gardens in Madison was the top vote getter. The interview was before the presidential elections and came from an article he wrote in New York Times asking the future president to rethink food policy in the USA and gave some simple ways to Grow Renewable Affordable Food.

The person I visited in jail tonight was a friend of my son who had lived with us for over six months when I first started to develop the Growing Power Home model. In fact, he made the Growing Power Box in the sun room and built the worm box outside. He is in the House of Corrections, jail, because of his mental health illness and problems with alcohol. In one episode a couple years ago the neighbors called the police on him. When he was in the police station and the officers had no reason to keep him but would not send him to the mental health hospital, they charged him with “resisting arrest.” Eventually he pleaded guilty to the charge on the advice of his legal assistance lawyer. For that he got probation for a number of years. While on probation he had a suicidal incident, in which he acted like he was going to blow himself up with some fake grenades with firecracker powder. For this incident he was taken to the mental health hospital and when he got back on his medicine and was doing better, he was sent to the House of Corrections for a probation violation. After a few months he signed the papers accepting his ‘revocation.’ Then the country charged him with new counts stemming from the suicide threat. He, sadly, is a good example of why our jails and prison system are the largest facilities for persons with mental illnesses in the USA.

When he got to the House of Corrections, the first thing they did was take away the medicine he was receiving in the mental health hospital and put him on some other kind. When he told a social worker the new medicine was causing him problems he was thrown in the ‘hole’ for a few days. So now he stays quiet and lives in a dormitory with forty other ill patients day and night where he sleeps and eats what little food they feed him. A new supervisor of the House of Corrections, the County Sheriff, has cut the budget for the facility by cutting the portions of food.

So while one person keeps busy by talking on the phone in his ear; another man tells us the value of meditation and silence on the mind and body; a third tells how we can grow sustainable and organic food if we could change our food policy; while another, a very talented young man, goes hungry and wastes his time and talent in jail wanting to get well but unable to do or be what he desires; and I, the fifth person writes this post. What do all these five observations of men have in common besides being men? I, being a part of it do not know. But I sense there is in all of us a deep desire for peace and for healthy mind and body that often is buried not in good earth but by the noisy violence that surrounds us. What do you think? Five observations in One?

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