Fresh Out of Prison

Blackbird
Originally uploaded by ojodorado

Once again I am astounded by the encounters that a person can have simply riding the bus.

Today I was on the Greyhound coming back to the Bay Area from the Sierra Nevadas. After Sacramento the bus got pretty crowded, and it got loud. Some guy behind me was rapping enthusiastically to himself, his eyes glazed and a faint smile on his face like he had left part of himself on another planet. Another guy behind me was talking loudly about something, and I was trying hard to ignore his voice by burying my nose in a book on Chinese medicine.

Rapper guy just kept right on beboppin by himself and Loud Guy finally asked if anyone knew about local Bay Area busses, so I turned and answered his question. So Loud Guy and i get into a conversation about Chinese medicine and the book I am reading, and turns out he's talking loud because he's deaf. Also turns out he's just gotten out of prison a few hours ago, and he's reading a book by Bo Lozoff , a guy who teaches prisoners how to turn their cells into ashrams with the human kindness project.

http://www.humankindness.org.

The book has pictures of chakras and endorsements by people like the Dalai Lama and letters from prisoners all over the U.S.

Loud Guy's real name is David but he goes by Crow, and I can tell by talking to him that he's pretty nervous about being out of prison for the first time in three years. He's wearing a white t-shirt and loose dark pants and slippers and carrying a little bag and a hundred dollars. He apologizes for not having street clothes yet, he says a relative was supposed to greet him at the prison gate with clothes, but never showed up.

Out of his forty-two years, he says he's only spent six 'on the outside'--all the rest were in institutions of some kind or another.

He's gonna try real hard this time to not go back, he says, even though alcoholism 'runs in his family' and makes him do crazy stuff.

"Just one step at a time," he says, "just one step at a time."

The bus sails over the Bay Bridge and the wide expanse of the city and the bay open up before us.

"Wow," he says.

I leave him at the bus station on Mission Street, clutching his book and his bag, shivering in his white t-shirt, waiting for the next bus to take him to a homeless shelter in Marin.

Good luck, my friend.

A Moment of Kindness

The Dalai Lama
Originally uploaded by ojodorado

I had two things on my mind to talk about when I sat down to blog today. One was an incident on a bus that reminded me of the importance of the small moments of kindness in the world. And the other was China.

What photo was I going to choose that could illustrate one or both of my thoughts? Ahem, said the Dalai Lama from my flikr page, choose me choose me.

So I did, and in posting his smiling face I am reminded of that powerful moment when I snapped the photo in Cusco, Peru, as His Holiness arrived to meet with representatives of the Qero people.

I had many many powerful and 'mystical' moments in Peru which I am now being challenged to translate to my ordinary life in the daily slog of a crumbling and shifting California.

So, first the moment of kindness. And then China.

I was waiting for a bus in Richmond California to go visit a friend in Marin County when I struck up a conversation with an elder woman who said she liked the color of my hair. Turns out she was a psychic and had
all sorts of interesting things to say. But probably the most interesting was that she thanked me for the conversation, saying that she had been feeling that people
in Marin were not very kind, and that our conversation had reminded her that there were still kind people in the world.

This came at a time when I wondered if I was 'wasting my time' and not 'doing enough' with myself, watching everyone buzzing around in their cars and hammering away on their laptops while I seemed to be spending more time these days noticing what is actually going on around me.

So it was an 'aha' moment,like the beautiful stone you find on your path that reminds you that you are on the right road.

Now for China. In the news today there's an article about China's nervousness about the U.S. economy, and its advice to us to spend our money wisely or they may not want to give us any more of it. All of a sudden I felt like I was back in the 'developing' world, when I was always reading articles about how the U.S. wanted the government of whatever particular country I was in to act. Them that holds the cash holds the power, I spoze. And now the shoe is on the other foot.

But wait, my photo of the Dalai Lama says. Now you have to somehow link these two ideas. And what, he says, does kindness have to do with China and the economic crisis?

Well, you of all people can certainly tell me about China, I say. And maybe I don't know the answer to that question.

But I do know that kindness, like fear, is a kind of viral disease---the more you feed it the more of it you get.

And that if you are foolish enough to be riding buses in Marin County when almost everyone else is driving, you never know what you might find.

Ma Da Go Cafone: The Secret Language of the South

When I was in junior high school in Berkeley, an African-American friend named Gwen, took a trip down south to visit some relatives.

"Damn," she said when she returned, "I couldn't understand hardly anything they said."

"Like what?" I asked, stuffing my clothes into the gym locker next to hers.

"Like Ma Da Go Cafone." She said.

"What?"

"Ma Da Go Cafone," she repeated. "It means 'my daughter went to California."

I thought Ma Da Go Cafone was so cool that I used it as a powerful mantra to torture my younger brother, repeating it over and over and telling h im I wouldn't let him know what it meant until he turned 13. I kept my word, but he was probably disappointed.

White or black, people here in the South talk differently than I do.

A pale skinny guy on the Greyhound bus from Alabama to Tennessee began to make conversation with me while I was trying to catch up on my writing.

"Ahm gon ta Paduca tagit me a truck." he said.

Oh lord, I thought, some redneck that has nothing better to do than make conversation that I don't understand.

"Hmm," I said, staring intently at my writing pad. Scribble, scribble.

Eventually he began to make so many semi-intelligible comments that I was forced to put down my pen and listen.

And I found that the guy had a lot to teach me. About what it's like to be a truck driver in Alabama, for instance, when all the small and middle sized trucking companies are folding because of the price of gas, and the big companies are cutting back on salaries and benefits.

"Everythang's gon corporate, " he said. "We're losin that human touch, we're just numbers ta them."

Well, I thought, this is a language that a lot of people in this country seem to be speaking.

I learned about his passion for genealogy--something we share--and about how to speak Southern.

"Yont." he said. "Mayonaisse."

"What?" I asked politely, wondering if he might be trying to tell me about his daughter going to California.

"Yont ta come with me ta Paduca? Mayonaisse a lotta people on this bus!"

He laughed, then admitted that he had stolen a lot of his lines from a famous Southern comedian who makes jokes about rednecks.

But it was new to me, so I laughed too.

"When ah wuz up North, "he said, "ev'body loved the way ah talked. They jus kept asking me over and over to say something, anything."

The countryside we were passing was green, with rolling hills. Alabama was much more beautiful than I expected.

"That's my town," he said, "just over that hill. Not much to look at, just simple country living, but it's where I'm from. I love it. Wouldn't want to live anywhere else. "

I had put my writing pad down. He was actually a pretty interesting and good hearted guy.

At Nashville, the bus stopped, and I got off, wishing him goodbye and good luck.

He said something in response that sounded like a mouthful of cornbread, but which I now recognized as the secret language of the South.