Starved soul
Starved soul
By Brandon Astor
"George Washington Carver, it is said, used to get up and go out into the woods every day just before sun-up and sit on his favorite tree stump. While there, during his daily meditations, he would talk to flowers and bushes in an effort to get them to reveal their secrets ... One wonders how much better our interactions and dialogues might be with one another if we spent more time, now and then, talking to beautiful green things that grow out of the ground." — Irving Elmer Bell
Recently, I received a photograph of my wonderful sister and friend Janet. Janet was born and grew up in Ireland but lives in England now. The photograph that she sent was taken a couple of months ago in Scotland.
I needed to see that photograph badly. Janet is on a footpath and is surrounded by so much blooming beauty that it literally warms the gripping chill that pervades this 4' 8" by 7' 11" (1.4 by 2.4 metres), sterile, steel and concrete cell where I am locked up 23 hours a day.
That photograph has been good for my soul. Few people can fully appreciate the importance of photographs to some prisoners. They often allow us visual escapes from the oppressions of confinement, a degree of freedom, albeit briefly: escape to a scented open vastness peppered with blooms all along the quiet little footpath.
My soul longs for the beauty of nature, and sometimes that longing so overwhelms me that I fear for my sanity. Just to look upon a photograph of another human being amid nature's beauty can nourish me in a way that prison food never can.
Last month I actually touched a living bush. When I did so, it touched me back; it reached right down into the depths of my hungry heart and soul.
It happened while I was returning from the prison's visiting room, where I had spent a few treasured hours with my Australian family. On the day before, when I was walking back from the visiting room with a prison guard, we walked past a long line of neatly trimmed hedges for about 70 feet (20 metres).
It had been many, many years since I had been in the presence of growing bushes, and I was deeply moved just to see them. I wanted to stop and touch them, but I did not feel the guard would respond well if I did. It was clear he was having a bad day — as prison guards so often do.
Nevertheless, as I walked I was talking to each bush quietly inside my head. I promised them, "I will be back tomorrow". I promised them that if there was a friendlier guard with me, not only would I talk to them again in their magnificent greenness, I would touch them as well.
The next day, the same guard brought me back, but he was not at all like the day before. As we walked, I hesitated ever so briefly, and I bent down and gently ran my hand over the top surface of one hedge's beauty. In the same instant it was as if the hedge had thousands of tiny green hands and all of them touched me back, not so much on my hands as deep in the inner regions of my heart and soul.
It happened in less than half a second. I could even smell those hedges! Afterwards, I said to the guard, "That was the first time I have touched a growing bush in over 17 years!" He did not miss my excitement; it seemed that he understood. His compassion was silent but clear in his unusually permissive attitude.
That bush begged me to touch it that day. I heard it speak, and it is the better for having been touched and spoken to — as is the energy spectrum of this dehumanising place. Even though it has been well over a month since I touched, and was touched by, that bush, as I write I can still feel its gentle nurturing touch in the depths of my nature-starved soul.
[The writer is a prisoner in the United States. He welcomes letters commenting on his columns. He can be written to at: Brandon Astor Jones, Georgia State Prison, HCO1, E-2-36, Reidsville, GA 30453, USA.]