Simply and Beautifully Woman

 

The Walk to Prison and Beyond  

 

Summer Series #5 

 

Something Beautiful, 

Unexpected 

 

July 6, 2012 

A New Summer Series #5 Something Beautiful, Unexpected

Greetings!   

 

 

Do you remember when someone "touched you"?...when they made your life better by a simple word or smile, gift or phone call? Do you remember when someone listened to you or spoke the truth to you that helped turn your life around? 

 

It is amazing how we yearn for love...all of us. There is something placed in the center of our heart that can never quite get enough of it.  And yet, at the same time, the simplest sign of love or kindness can fill us to the brim and make our day shine and give us hope to walk through some darkness, no longer alone...because we were touched by love.  

 

 

So, how does love reach through the bars of a prison cell?

 

...the bars of solitary confinement?

 

...to meet Judy?

 

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

"On Oct. 6, 1983, clenching a fist of solidarity, Clark was sent to the maximum-security prison for women at Bedford Hills in Westchester County to begin the rest of her life."  Tom Robbins  

 

Judy continued her stay in prison with clenched fists and plotted her escape.  The escape plans were found and she was sent to solitary confinement for two years... 

one of the longest stretches any Bedford Hills prisoner had ever received!

 

 

 

 

 

Judy and Hariet 
Before the Prison Bars: 
Judy and Harriet
 
These quotes below are taken from the New York Times Article on Judy this past January
by Tom Robbins 
 picture is from Judith Clark
  

 

In the summer of 1986, while Clark was in solitary, someone said something to her that finally broke through to her. Gilda Zwerman, a sociologist who was studying violence-prone activists, didn't mince words. "I understand how you did this to yourself," she told Clark. "What I don't understand is how you did this to your daughter."

 

Clark tried to look defiant, but her lip twitched, and she began to quietly weep. Zwerman nudged her further. "You can't cry for yourself and Harriet," she said, "and not see that the children of the men who were killed cried the same way for their fathers."

 

It was the first time Clark had broken down in front of another person since her arrest. She returned to her cell shaken but oddly relieved. "I felt like I had taken off a layer of armor," she said. "I no longer felt like I had all the answers."

 

Clark says that solitary - known as SHU for Special Housing Unit - was filled with mentally ill women. "They were howling at the moon, eating their mattresses and setting fires." She found herself speaking with the guards. "I would talk about my life and my daughter and the situation." The exchanges with people in uniform, Clark said, "made me have to get out of the fog of the rhetoric and think about those affected by this crime."

 

She began keeping a journal. She had used her radicalism, she realized, much the way prisoners around her used drugs, as a means to avoid confronting her own doubts. She walled herself off in the safety of doctrine. "I was beginning to say these politics are crazy. I've experienced so much loss, and created so much loss, for the sake of an illusion."

 

She consumed books on psychology and wrote poetry. Solitary was grueling, she said. "But as horrible as it felt, I felt more alive than I had been. It was like coming out of this cave and being able to see again and feel." 

The Path by Ann 


 

 

  

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I thank God for the prison guards who were there for Judy, when she was touched by love, along her path of solitary confinement.

 

Who will you touch with love today? 

 

 

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