A love letter from prison

this is our ecosystem

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

This week, inside a prison classroom, I watched women gather fragments of themselves that were wild, uncaged, unbreakable.

I asked them to look through the only window in the room, toward the weedy yard and the lone, distant tree. There was no forest. No green cathedral of wilderness. Only rock, wire, concrete—and a rest…