The Drowned and the Saved

You know in this country
Most of us operate under the delusion
That we live in the 21st century
And that somehow
Without actually doing the work
We have overcome our history
It's not true
Instead of hanging people from trees
We use the so-called criminal justice system to perform legalized lynchings
And take this as a sign of progress
We confuse form with substance

When I embarked on this journey 29 years ago
I was given the choice to either plead guilty to something I didn't do
Or face the death penalty
I was twenty-five years old
And the thought that I would have to give up my life
Represented a great burden to me
A burden that I wasn't so sure I could bear
I didn't understand back then that there was something more valuable
Than simply being alive
Although I intuitively understood that existing was not the same thing as living
I also somehow understood that in order to live with myself
I had to be true to myself
And for this I would have to pay a hell of a price

After I was sentenced to death I was thrown in solitary confinement
It felt like I was thrown into the middle of the ocean
Try to imagine it:
Water as far as the eye can see
And it's just you by yourself, floating
That's what solitary confinement is like
In situations such as this, God ceases to be an abstraction
Some thing that exists apart from who you are and what you do
This is the domain of the drowned and the saved
Life is very real here
And your senses mean more to you than they ever will
What you can see, what you can feel
What you can hold in your hands
These are the only things that matter
You begin to comprehend that, under the circumstances
A piece of driftwood can be God
I mean the smallest thing can save or change your life
And this piece of driftwood, a book, a dream, a random stranger
Has not come to inquire about your particular race or religion
Instead, it has been sent to ask a more basic question
Do you want to live?

And what does it mean to be alive
What are we doing here
If you ask Nazim Hikmet, who's one of my favorite poets
He would tell you that, "Living is no laughing matter"
Which, to me, implies that we didn't come here to play
To have fun
And if that be the case then I can live right here where I am
Right here on death row
I needed to know that
More importantly, I needed to know that it's possible to lose everything
And still be saved
At some point
I had to be willing to accept that the vastness I was so afraid of was God
Which exists inside of me, inside of all of us
To accept this truth, I had to go within
And teach myself how not to be afraid
And what exactly did I have to be afraid of anyway
Death? Hell?

Well, as James Baldwin once famously said
"When one is continually surviving the worst that life can bring,
One eventually ceases to be controlled by a fear of what life can bring"
I amen his clarity
The arc of the moral universe bends towards justice, we are told
This may very well be
But we, with our own hands and mind
Must bend it
We have to do the work
People are dying who could be saved