Here, there is a narrow space, where everything is supported. - Nārāyaṇa Sūktam

Freedom, democracy, and personhood

I have a friend who first did yoga while she was in jail. “I’d never felt so free,” she said, “and I was literally incarcerated.”

When she told me this, I remembered reading a borrowed bible in New Orleans Parish Prison. I wouldn’t have said I felt ‘free’, but I think this is a semantics thing and that I really was, I just didn’t have the word. Generally speaking I was shattered. I had no hope, no plans to get myself out of the situation, no dignity. I wasn’t reading the Bible for redemption, didn’t turn to god during the dark night of the soul. I grabbed it as a book rather than a deal breaker with Jesus. A sweet, balding woman, with ancient blue tattoos and a crack smoker’s face gave it to me. She smoker hacked into her elbow, swallowed the proceeds, and handed me the floppy book. I spent hours on my cot with my knees drawn up and my nose in the thing. Unfreedom was made of the constant metallic clamor, a powerlessness over the lights, and ceaseless human noise: there was always somebody crying, somebody losing their mind, someone threatening, or someone laughing. But my felt sense of incarceration wasn’t limited to the ward. It had little to do with the coarse orange jumpsuit several sizes too big for me or the way it left a rash on my belly. It wasn’t the clammy smell coming off my own person as I learned to play spades with other people who also smelled bad: these all seemed arbitrary details of the unshakable feeling that I was either going to die of alcoholism or kill myself. There was no other possibility. Alcoholism or suicide hardly differed, really; the outcome was the same and it was inevitable.

I was condemned.

Reading was salvation. So long as I was reading, I felt what my friend called “free”. That the book happened to be a bible was irrelevant: I would have read anything. I would have read in Cyrillic or Mandarin for all the meaning I was getting. Salvation wasn’t in the meaning of the words but the existence of the words and where they took me in myself. They hooked into some part of me under my funk and my twitches and my paleness. So long as I felt the existence of this place in myself, I was not experiencing captivity of either the material or the existential variety.

It’d be nice if I could say I came to Jesus -or that I got sober - at that point. I didn’t. I just got out of jail after a certain amount of time and then I went to rehab. I didn’t actually get clean for another decade.

I know now that what I was doing while I read is the phenomena called ‘meditation’. Despite and amidst confining circumstances, I could find a place inside myself that was free. Peace that passes understanding, I suppose.

E.B. White wrote a gorgeous little essay in July of 1940 called Freedom. I recognize what both my friend and I experienced - while incarcerated - in his definition: