Theme: Magicians Reporting for Duty

Week 10: in which a prison guard and a Broadway star teach us how to see

Beautiful Magicians,

In the fall of 2013, I flew to New York City to visit my 24-year-old son who was being held in a high security federal prison for the “crime” of refusing to name fellow activists in Occupy. Jerry’s silence sent the judge into an apoplectic fit.

Jerry’s imprisonment was, and is, a strange story that still lives in me.

Watching my son suffer through eight months of prison had massive repercussions that still reverberate in my professional life.

Prison changed my books, starting with Soul Vows

Prison exploded my understanding of what it really takes to forgive. The original Hawaiian prayer of forgiveness, Ho`oponopono (not the four sentences) helped me wrestle with forgiveness so powerfully that I continued to say it long after Jerry was released.

On February 5, 2018, I had a strange and unexpected encounter with an ancient husband as I was saying Ho`oponopono. That experience led me to write the most powerful forgiveness prayer I, or anyone, has ever written. “If I Forgave You” asks the question: Can I forgive the unforgiveable crimes patriarchy has committed against women? Can I? And if I do, who would that patriarch be? And furthermore, who would I be?

It’s not an accident that just twenty days after “If I Forgave You,” a voice whispered Prayer Artist in the night. Forgiveness made me ready.

Prison upended my spiritual life

Prison dropped me into a deeper mystical life, preparing the way for Mystic Witch seven years later. When witch arrived, I began a long hard research project to begin to understand what patriarchy has done to women labeled witches. Prison reared its ugly head in every book I read.

Prison changed my political life

Once I personally experienced the frightening reality that prison has nothing to do with justice; it’s a business; I knew I needed to read about the relationship of racism and slavery to prison. Like my witch research, this was, and continues to be, hard reading.

And don’t think this is relegated to the slavery or Jim Crow past. Consider the concentration camps being built today to house tens of thousands of non-white immigrants. Those concentration camps are a wildly profitable business. And guess who gets those contracts?

But there’s one other rather strange thing that visiting my son in prison taught me.

At first, I thought it was so odd that it must be a one-off, an accident, a strange tic of one guard. I never thought I’d write a newsletter about it. But now I think it may be what underlies everything.

Here’s what happened.

Because I had to fly from Florida to New York to see my son, the prison visitation rules allowed me to have a two-hour visit, rather than the usual one hour. In the regulations, it said I was to present my boarding pass to a corrections officer when I arrived at the prison.

So, after dressing correctly with no metal on any of my clothes (there are even rules about the color of your clothes!), stowing my purse and coat in a locker, and going through three different metal detection screening machines—including one just for shoes, I was finally in a room where all the visitors wait to be called to go up in an elevator, accompanied by a guard.

Holding my boarding pass, I walked up to a tall guard, smiled, showed him my pass, and asked if there was anything I needed to do to be allowed to have the extra hour with my son.

He looked down at me. Although “look” is not the correct verb.

There is no word for how he looked at me. His eyes were pointed in my direction but there was no contact. I was so taken aback, that I stared hard at him to try to see if I could break through the invisible glass barrier between us. How did he manage to “look” at me but his vision stopped about twelve inches beyond his face. His vision never reached me.

His eyes were open but he did not, could not, would not, see me.

He never answered my question, so I carried my boarding pass up the elevator and tried to show it to the guard on the prison floor. He too, “looked” at me without seeing me.

Long after he was released, I asked Jerry about this lack of real eye contact. And he said, oh yeah, the correction officers never make eye contact.

I tucked this away in my heart until yesterday when I read a fun article in the New York Times about Jonathan Groff. Do you know who he is?

• You’ve seen him in Hamilton. He’s King George.
• And if you follow Broadway shows, you’ve seen or heard about him in several productions.
• How about Glee? Surely you saw and heard him as Jesse.
• And if you follow the Tony Awards you know Groff won Lead Actor in a Musical for Merrily we Roll Along in 2024.
• Today, Jonathan Groff is wrapping up a year of playing Bobby Darin in Just in Time.
• Maybe you saw some of the cast members dancing and singing in the Thanksgiving Macy Day Parade.
• His dancing turned into quite the meme with people trying to copy the addictive rhythm.

Perhaps you have to be my age to get a little excited about Bobby Darin. When I’m depressed, and there’s so so much to be depressed about right now, I say to myself, “What the world needs now is a little Bobby Darin.”

So, I read the NYT article with joy. And surprise.

Turns out it’s about eye contact.

Really. Eye contact. Here’s a powerful paragraph from the article. After telling us that the show ends with Jonathan telling the audience, “I love you,” Ben Brantley writes:

“So when [Groff] says, ‘I love you’ to an audience with whom he has flirted, danced and locked eyes throughout the show, there is little doubt that the feeling is reciprocated. Alex Timbers, the musical’s director, recalled telling Groff during previews that everyone watching him seemed to believe that he was addressing them individual. Groff’s answer was delivered with absolute sincerity: ‘I am.’”

As I read that, I got a little weepy. And I realized that eye contact, real honest, direct, sweet eye contact—eye contact that says: I see you, I hear you, I am right here in front of you, and you are right here in front of me—is medicine. Real medicine. Healing medicine. The medicine of magicians. Not a conjuring trick, but a real spiritual ability to acknowledge one another’s humanity.

There would be no concentration camps, no wars, no prisons, no cruelty, no abuse if we all practiced the magic of seeing.

Want to begin?

Look in the mirror when you brush your teeth and stop and look deeply into your own eyes and say: “You are precious and important.”

The world would change if we all did that.

And then turned to another, and say the same, “You are precious and important.

Life is Fragile, Handle with Reverence. And eye contact!

Janet

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