May Recap

Reflections and a review of a month spent in the flow

Hello All,

I hope that this finds you and yours well, shining your lights brightly. My 57th month of incarceration is in the books, and although I was locked inside due to contraband sanctions, the month felt so expansive that at times it seemed like I might burst. I have a few updates and reflections to share with you.

May was about breaking—breaking loose, breaking through, and breaking open. Once I was open, I felt deeply in the flow of ideas, words, plans, and a vision for my future. It was exhilarating and exhausting. It normally takes me three months to fill a journal. Last month I filled one in three weeks. I could not write fast enough to capture everything that was coming to me through meditation, conversation, correspondence, and reading. This passage from The Solace of Open Spaces struck me as I furiously scribbled:

"Everything in nature invites us constantly to be what we are. We are often like rivers: careless and forceful, timid and dangerous, lucid and muddied, eddying, gleaming, still... In his journal, Thoreau wrote, 'A man's life should be as fresh as a river. It should be the same channel but a new water every instant.'"

As I sit in the Think Tank each day, with my channel open, I can feel my consciousness expanding, an evolution transpiring, moment to moment. The inanity of my surroundings has proven itself largely irrelevant and has been washed away.

Speaking of reading, I am now at 606 books read since I arrived at Thomson. I owe you a review of the sixth 100, which will be posted in the near future. In the meantime, favorites for May were: Straight Shooter, The Complete Musashi, Make Your Next Shot Your Best Shot, Zero to One, A Certain Idea of America, and The Mystery of Golf. Many thanks to those of you who continue to send me books. If you don't hear from me directly, it's likely because once the book went through the mail screening process here, any indication of who sent it has been removed. In addition to the books you send, there are a few dozen more that I set aside in the Think Tank to try and finish before I leave.

One guy who might be taking a little break from reading (just a short one, I hope) is my son Jack. He graduated with a degree in business from the University of Arizona and will start his job later this summer after decompressing by mowing grass at Canal Shores. Dude's got it figured out. I am proud of him and excited to see how the next chapter of his life unfolds. Graduation reports from other proud papas and mamas have been reaching me, and they make my heart burst with joy.

The pace of my writing continues to increase, and I'm grateful to Lisa for creating the Substack as a vehicle for me to process as my homecoming nears. Thank you for following along, for sharing my posts with others, and for your encouragement to keep expressing myself. The comments function on the site is now active. Feel free to add your thoughts to the mix. I enlisted Jack to help me with interaction. Please bear with us as we work out the logistics.

In the interest of maximum career preparedness, I'm working on my verbal communications as well. As you know, I delivered a speech at the prison board meeting. I'm teaching the weekly sessions of the TGA. Our meditation group has grown, and I periodically share musings on equanimity and other subjects. I gave a talk at the camp's weekly church service that I'll tell you more about in a moment. And my buddy Shawn invited me to teach one session of his philosophy class. I'm getting down with Michel de Montaigne and will pass along his wisdom to my fellow prison philosophers. All good practice for potential opportunities in my career to come.

What got me invited to church was a passage I shared with my buddy Sharod from a book titled The Celestine Prophecy. I first read the book 30 years ago, and the re-read had a full-circle feel to it. It was a key factor in the breaking sensation I mentioned. Memories and insights from years past have broken loose and are coming through to me, like pieces in a puzzle that I didn't even know I was putting together. The author, James Redfield, wrote:

"All the interests that led you forward in your past, all these stages of growth, were just preparing you to be here, now... You've been working on your evolutionary search for a self-enhancing spirituality throughout your entire life... You are here because this is where you need to be to continue your evolution. Your whole life has been a long road leading you directly to this moment... We all have a spiritual purpose, a mission that we have been pursuing without being fully aware of it, and once we bring it completely into consciousness, our lives can take off."

It now occurs to me that this phase of growth and awakening has lasted 30 years, and not just the 57 months of my incarceration. Seeds that were planted long ago have taken root and are now ready to burst forth. Confirmation of this insight came to me from legendary samurai swordsman Miyamoto Musashi in his aphorism in The Book of Five Rings:

"One thousand days of training to forge,
Ten thousand days of training to refine."

I am refined and ready to go, and when I walk out the exit door, I will be crossing the start line of a whole new adventure. It is the phase when I employ failures transformed into lessons, hardships transformed into strength, and harms transformed into healing—all for the good of my loved ones and community.

In Straight Shooter, Stephen A. Smith relates the story of bumping into Pat Riley at an inflection point in his life. ESPN had just fired him, and he had no idea what, if anything, would be next in his career as a sports journalist. He put his hand out to Riley as if to say “goodbye,” but Riley wasn’t having it. Stephen A. described the vivid moment that saved his career, and possibly his life:

"Riley sighed. Then he looked me straight in the eye, like he might look at one of his players in the locker room after a tough defeat, and snapped, 'Put your damn hand down. I'm not shaking your hand. You're acting like this is over, like you're finished. Well, you're not finished. Lift your head up and save the handshakes for when you come back. Because you will come back.'"

This incarceration experience is almost finished. Riley's words, and so many other uplifting messages, ring in my ears all day, every day. My homecoming will be a comeback. A comeback that is focused on paying forward the immeasurable goodness I have received from all of you. Stephen A. continued, "My firing would not be my epitaph. There would be a new beginning. I'd see to it." I'm seeing to my new beginning. It has begun.

Lisa and I are often asked how I’m doing. A simple and loving question, and one that has been hard to answer at many points during the past decade. I find myself drawing a blank when I'm asked because my first thought is, how do I even begin to encapsulate what has happened, what is happening to me, and where I see myself going? In the interest of not merely blurting out something unintelligible, here is my best answer to that little-big question at this moment:

I am changed.
I have owned my part in these circumstances.
I see the world around me differently and more clearly.
I rediscovered my authentic self.
I am living from my core values of equanimity, accountability, and love.
I have a vision for the next phase of my life and career, and I'm moving toward it every day with purpose.
I am in the flow of ideas, words, and plans.
I am ready to go.
I am changed and better than ever. The best is yet to come.

Thank you for your unwavering support and companionship on this journey. You mean more to me than you know.

Onward we go. Much love to you all.