Dec 22, 2021
(Ed Note: opps!)
Orion Magazine (US) – Anya Groner
The Solitary Garden
As a caution, those who search for true justice and for empathy among all people may be powerfully moved by this story. We are generally so focused on change that its top agent empathy gets left behind. We in Canada have been haunted by the practices of our prison system, especially in its failure to provide adequate health care and its brutal solitary confinement. The link offers a new immersion into caring responsiveness to one another, to full mental and medical care for those persons in prisons, to a justice born of healing, to a justice raising our common humanity as the true fulcrum of life. “Solitary Gardens is a social art project that matches inmates in solitary confinement with pen pals on the outside.” The link is not to a nice story but the story itself and its practice of reflection has some power to bring change born of suffering needlessly inflicted on people. The hoped for change is the end of this sort of destructive and demeaning treatment, the end of solitary and of prisons. Artist jackie sumell (no caps wanted) has inspired a host of potential for change and vision for an alternate future by inviting people in prison and in solitary to change their cell into an imaginative garden through pen pals.
“By design, Solitary Gardens inverts the coercive labor practices of chattel slavery. Decision making occurs from the bottom up. Those with the least power — incarcerated men — map the layout and makeup of each bed, while volunteers on the outside see those plans through. On every level, participation is by choice, and what the gardens produce — vegetables, herbs, and flowers — is given away freely. The arrangement models another way of being, an economy rooted in generosity, not capital.” If we can imagine, we can do.
Said one exposed to the garden theme: “how she plans to both garden and protest incarceration, how those acts will give her life meaning, how acknowledging suffering is its own kind of balm, how beauty can arise from the worst of what we do, how a seed watered and cared for can tear down walls. I know what she means because I feel it, too. Humbled. Inspired. Empowered. And that’s the whole point. Jackie’s art isn’t about her. It’s about everyone else: volunteers and school groups, families and friends, gardeners and pen pals, victims and perpetrators. Solitary Gardens is for the gentleman on her street who was stabbed last night; it’s also for the man who did the stabbing.” Worth yet another newsletter and a repeated reading over the holidays for a renewed start in the New Year. https://orionmagazine.org/article/the-solitary-garden/
An equally outrageous idea:
Basic Income Canada on Twitter: “What if we just guaranteed everyone a base standard of living? #BasicIncome https://t.co/iPR9rwFX4w”
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