This Is How It Goes Around Here

KC comes over to Rach and me to ask if we want to donate any food, because Carla is pregnant and “you fucking know MDC” — the second half of that sentence being “that they aren’t going to do anything about it.” Which is such a strange meme around here, because it’s patently not true. I’ve had high-end insurance and the medical care here rivals it. It’s basically concierge service. They come to you twice a day. One girl got acne in here, a result I suspect of coming off drugs after twenty years. A friend of mine goes to an Upper East Side dermatologist to the socialites and has been given the exact same prescriptions.

The issue is that it’s something of a cry-wolf culture. Pain is unprocessed in here. Not like the food. Marcy was in labor every day of her pregnancy, “water breaking labor” six times a day. The nurses would haul their butts over from tending to stab wounds and suicide attempts on the west side only to see her little gremlin smile, because really she had just wanted out of the dorm for a bit.

Or someone with a heart attack — turns out they had smoked too much K2 and had a vision of a dragon in the bathroom (this really happened). If I’ve seen it all, the medical staff has certainly seen it all.

There’s also the strange condition of the entitlement of the marginalized. Few will talk about it in any circle, but it’s one of the most disabling elements of a people. It’s a mixture of defeatism — nobody cares — and demand — I’ll show you — that women in here, and really anyone who has held power in their hands, are susceptible to. It goes from zero to tyrannical real fast. Women are policing the others with their BOP manual, standing there reading it to them, feeling like big shots because they can make someone feel as shitty as they do. Or they are writing cop-outs, getting women fired from their jobs so they can take their place.

Power is seen as retribution. I’ll show you. I’m literally living the Stanford Prison Experiment. But the Goliath of the BOP has one response: squeeze. Go ahead, be a big shot. Paint yourself as Malcolm X. We will just keep squeezing away. Everyone will suffer.

So KC is asking us for food. It’s no problem. We offer our best: the Brushy Creek chicken packets, Minute Rice, mayo. Our daily staples. Carla comes over to thank us. She’s still waiting on her pregnancy test, but as KC says with the MDC eye roll, “we all know.”

“She’s even got a waddle already,” she says, patting Carla’s belly. We hold the sad/elated that one feels in here. Sad that she will be pregnant in a federal prison, elated as women since the beginning of time have felt about another woman carrying life in her belly.

Except the test comes back negative. And Carla keeps blowing up. She’s pregnant, it seems, with a Suboxone baby — Suboxone being something akin to methadone.

Withdrawals, mixed with years of malnourishment from being on the streets, with no understanding of how to process the flood of emotions. The reason they used in the first place, the sedentary life, and the cocktail of medication make Jane a bloated girl.

Food is a panacea in here, except to cure women of the results of too much food. The kind of food a mother would put back on the shelf if her child picked it up in a grocery store. Really, over two-thirds of the women in here are carrying unprocessed emotion babies. They wear their emotions around their midsection.

I read a study once that said women would rather die than get fat. Zen will shake her head at me and Rach and say in her Mandarin accent, “Why you no get fat?” Irritated. I did not realize the extreme body-image issues of Asian women until I came in here. They are the only other women in the gym with us. But it’s something of an obsession for them. They ask us, as if we are strange specimens, “What, what you do, no get fat?”

Muscle memory, really. And by the grace of God. I have a low psychic tolerance for pain and a high “try anything.” One thing they say is that once you’ve had one taste of the divine you’ll do anything to get it — including the “drugs” like walking or eating well or prayer. Because you discover a sustainable source of relief.

If pills worked, I’d be first in line. It’s just that, invariably, with everything else I’ve tried, the solution becomes the problem.

I remember reading once that babies know what they need in terms of nutrients. Adults, with all of their ideas, interfere, trumping the body’s wisdom with intellectual interference. The signal gets scrambled and the survival instinct of hoard and comfort kicks in. Instincts run amok. I think this is true of most things: sunshine, sleep, as Michael Pollan says, “eat food, not too much, mostly plants,” some silence and trees, and most neuroses are remedied. Non-interference with life’s determination to self-liberate is vastly underestimated as a cure. Thoughts, feelings, impulses burst like bubbles if the ego doesn’t get in there with its meddling attempts to fix. But it comes down to, as Alan Watts says, a fundamental fear of nature, and that is a fear of the feminine (think Mother Earth), and that brings us back to gardens and apples and sex.

There’s prison, then there’s prison for women. Then there’s prison for women with sexuality in their case. Russian dolls of incarceration. Shame and exile cubed, which I believe is why Janiya vexes women so. She’s shameless. Reminds me of the Amber Rose video, the walk of no shame. She comes out of a stranger’s house the morning after in last night’s skintight dress, heels in her hand — the exact image every woman has been taught to arrange her whole life around avoiding. And the whole town congratulates her. The milkman says, “Say, it looks to me like you had sex last night.” She says, “I sure did.” The construction worker, who in every other version of this scene is the one doing the damage, tells her he respects that she enjoyed herself. The old woman at the chess table says, “Nothing I haven’t done before.” The mayor hands her the key to the city for her confidence and her ability to celebrate her body. It’s a joke, and the joke is on us. You watch it and you feel the shame you were about to hand her arrive with nowhere to land.

Janiya is a walking billboard of sex: “Yeah bitches, I’m a ho.” She catcalls officers. She rubs up against you when she wants you to give her a bottle of hot sauce.

Irrepressible. Will not be contained. She manages to turn her uniform into a stripper costume, tits and ass spilling out.

Not a woman in here who hasn’t tried to stop her, repress her, scold her, report her, control her, dominate her, silence her. For “her own good,” “for the good of the dorm,” because “that girl ain’t right.” She’s infinitely easier than anyone would imagine.

Love her. Respect her. Honor her.

And she would go to the ends of the earth for you. There’s a reason “hooker with a heart of gold” is a phrase. There’s a reason the Buddha returned as a prostitute. There’s a reason that for all of religion’s attempts, as a fundamental institution, to control sexuality — and they really gave it the college try — they failed. And there’s a reason I thank the gods that the best attempts of this institution have failed with this woman: I see her as a last hope for women.

She refuses to get in line like a good little girl and pretend like she doesn’t hold the trump card.

She knows. She takes it all in stride. Every now and again she allows herself to sit with me in silence while she plays a game on her tablet, pretending like there aren’t hot tears on her cheeks. She knows that it’s not women acting like men in here that people fear — the bullies, the violence. We are inured to that.

The world fears anything that is autonomous: the wolves of Yellowstone, the witches of Salem. Shoot, burn, humiliate. And the sovereign force of woman’s sexuality is the most terrifying of all, even to women. It’s a prime number; it can’t be reduced.

My friend Jim Harriot, a Stanford scientist who does brain modeling, said that he was presenting the effects of arousal on the brain to a group. A scientist asked what it meant in terms of the brain. He said, we don’t know that we have it upside down. Sex, or Eros, defines consciousness; it is not defined by it. It is the supreme Master passing as the servant, the ho, the inferior.

Wars were started, won, and lost. Empires built and destroyed. Fortunes gained and lost over women’s sexuality. The world we see is in response to this invisible center. The responsibility is incomprehensible. So much so that women throw that shit overboard as soon as they get the bag. Nuh-uh. No thank you. And so the violence turns.

In other words, it’s no small thing, this force we put down, make jokes about, try to use.

So when I see it alive and kicking inside a woman, knowing the bucking bronco she’s got kicking in her soul, I mobilize whatever forces I have to protect that at all costs.

And trust me, I have. I have gone toe-to-toe with nearly every woman in here. The red-and-white-shawl-wearing, mantra-bead-carrying white woman in the corner is not having it with the Janiya scapegoating. Don’t get me wrong, she is a royal pain in my butt, hardheaded as hell, says the exact provocative thing to inflame the fire in the dorm I just put out — can’t help herself. Again, thank God, because that unstoppable juggernaut is what we will need to break through the membrane of ignorance we are suffocating inside of.

I enlist Emunah.

Janiya then proceeds to keep the whole dorm up all night, offend every Latin woman in here, and yell at anyone who made a sound at 2 p.m. because she was exhausted from her evening foray, which involved drinking a certain “mystery” substance mixed with the blue Skittle juice.

Emunah was not having it.

And yet every day more miracles than I can count. Scales falling from my eyes, as they say. Yesterday, in the middle of mantras, the sense that a rusted metal collar and chain fell away, and an ache I’ve had in my neck for fifteen years evaporated.

Catching thought at the point of origin while it’s still a soft wisp, like a petal. Grasping, rejecting, and ignoring — the three poisons — are no stronger than a baby’s grip, where they used to be a vise grip. The sense of discovery at being at the mercy of nothing. A living, joyous, bodily admission.

Which is what my Lama taught for the Dalai Lama’s birthday, using Israel as the example. It’s beautiful, rich, and ancient. Beautiful people and wonderful energies. That’s the good. Then the bad: there’s been a lot of conflict for several generations. And the ugly is that some countries are lobbing missiles at Israel and Israel is lobbing some back.

This is one taste. It’s all always like this. So: to see the interconnection of all things, and the call for compassion. There is no “over there” where the bad and the ugly do not exist. But there is a place where they are experienced very differently — a reminder of the preciousness of life, where defeat is going over to the winning side, the attempt to control and manage life to get rid of the bad and the ugly rather than coexist with it.

The Buddha puts putrid food in his mouth, feeds it to his student, and it becomes ambrosia. This is one taste. The ugly transforms into wisdom and compassion.

So when I say to my mom, how would I begin to explain that I’m in the heaven I most avoided, it’s not hyperbole. Emunah understands this. When I do my frequency tests to see how far or how close I am to someone, I throw out something like “welcome to heaven” and watch for the response — everything from a glare of “fuck you” to a rote, learned “we are all here for a purpose” to a furtive glance of “you see it too?” Very few in the last category, but she is one. She goes hard. As Miriam complains, Emunah has her with, “If I can be facing twenty-to-life and be happy, you with six months can figure it out.”

Wealthy. That’s the word I say in almost every conversation. What I remind her of:

“Woman, you are wealthy in a way that most people could never imagine.”

She doesn’t deny it, but she doesn’t suffer fools either. Tina, the OG, called her a spitfire, and it stayed with me: “Don’t you worry ‘bout that girl, she can handle herself just fine.”

But I do.

Because in a sense I am that girl. I’m the girl who can so handle everything that people don’t worry. But I have my Lama, who doesn’t worry about me but does give me refuge, a place to fall apart. And I don’t care who you are — even if you’re made of titanium, everyone needs that. Women especially, because our strength is our softness.

She has the lock-and-load kind of mind of a woman deeply carved by the divine but equally so by what would break her. The prayer is that she will lock onto what won’t harm her or kill her. That the rocket she takes to escape doesn’t launch from a pipe or a needle but from the harder-to-find hearth of lineage. To watch her, in sheer muscle memory, work the room into its highest expression: roaring laughter here, praise there, a spanking to that one, quite shady with another. No woman left behind, even the rabble-rousers and the devious ones.

She comes over to visit, to release some of the excess of the process. The times she had to hold her tongue or her judgment only to head right back into the center of all of it, never leaving herself.

That’s why I try to matchmake her with Janiya. They are the raw force and the method combined, the two poles of upliftment in the dorm.

Such profoundly beautiful women. I like to quote the Dalai Lama saying that Western women will save the world. I understood the assignment. If I had to bet on ten of the tens of thousands of women I’ve met teaching over the years, they would be two of them. They’re naturals in a time when coming back to our nature will be what carries us. Two women so steeped in love, real love, love that doesn’t look right the way fruit that isn’t sprayed with coloring and wax doesn’t look right, but actually nourishes, actually transports, actually vibrates with life. It takes a minute to see what I curate for. It might just look like “crazy,” but it’s “real,” “original.” In this microcosm filled with fakes and frauds, be real.

Our kind don’t necessarily fit in. I came from Bay Area robe-wearing, benevolent-expression-of-compassion Buddhism. I just couldn’t — I broke the seams. Which seems to be happening with Emunah, who is tearing the elastic band out of her pants because, as she says, her sister is telling her she “got fat” and that can’t happen. From my position: she no longer looks like she’s on fentanyl, but if the fear makes her walk the track, so much the better.

She got bad news and walked quickly out of the video call room. Janiya saw it first and signaled us to follow her. There we were, the four of us standing in the gym, the curse of strong women — trembling inside with the news, but not one to cry, all she could say was “It’s not good. It’s really not good.” And all four of us know that Emunah will carry the burden with the grace of one carrying this thousand-pound boulder like a feather. And we know that she will make these rags of light look like riches. But for the moment we all just stand together.

The room accommodates. There’s the sense that we are in something hallowed. Light itself responds to her call. It knows her well. It takes her call and gives the response of warm, holy safety. One second, maybe five. Enough. These breadcrumbs of light.

The next night in meditation, in the role of our Rebbetzin, with valor, she reads the parshah for Shabbat. It’s particularly poignant.

The new woman who seemed to just tumble into the group says, “Damn, I didn’t know you came from a warrior class.” Rach and I look at each other: couldn’t have said it better ourselves.

Then she reads us the email from her father. I feel that deep stirring as she reads the story of her grandmother, what it was like to be Jewish in Communist Russia, the constant threat, the ultimatum — your life or your soul. The choices her grandmother made to follow that invisible thread of what she knew to be true, facing imprisonment, torture, death.

And yet, it was not a choice. In candlelit and clandestine rooms they read the prayers, had encounters, met in the broken and beautiful truths that fortify.

I listen, doing good Buddhist practice, to not “identify” too much. But how could I not? In here for what I believe, continuing the work underground. Her father’s words enter like the birds in the dorm — the last place you’d expect to see them — as if sent, hope from the outside. The reminder made of this dark amber light that frees me in its own way. I have no option. That is freedom. The mind and heart moving in the same direction. That is peace. Janiya, me, Emunah, Rach. At peace.