New Dispatch from Andy Stepanian

Tue, June 17, 2008

[Forward Widely]

Dear Friends,

In my daily routine I take notice to when my feet
touch terrain other than pavement.  I've become
accustomed to pavement as I walk on it everyday
circling within the prison's walls sweeping up trash
and listening to my radio.  There is much to be said
about institutionalization; about how it can bring out
the worst in people, or radically exemplify how we as
humans are creatures of habit.  Anytime something is
out of the ordinary routine it becomes more pronounced
due to confinement.  Things that when observed outside
of prison would seem quite ordinary take on
extraordinary wealth when they appear.  Feeling my
feet touch grass, even with the insulation of
sneakers, becomes profound when I spend most of my
time in a sea of pavement, razor wires, and steel
bars.  I've become hyper-sensitized not only to the
feel, but the noise of sneakers sliding against grass,
the colors and types of grass, and things suspended
amidst the blades.  I have developed a keen eye for
candy wrappers in the grass, even the clear ones( a
skill worthless in itself); but in developing that
keen eye i can't help notice the small wonders below
my feet; lady bugs, lavender buds, or windblown
evidence of an outside world.  if you ever read any
writings of mine from within prison you may find a
reoccurring theme of how wondrous our world is, how
confinement and deprivation of experience has made me
grow fonder of life, more ready to go out and fight
for it, and want to experience the most of it.  Until
now i have only given you words, today i hope to give
you more.

These are leaves that have blown over the prison walls
and onto the sidewalks and grass beneath my feet.
Like other breaks from prison normalcy these leaves
that blew over the tops of the walls and past the
razor wire from the forest at the compounds edge swell
  with extraordinary worth.  Imagine that prison is a
sensory deprivation environment; a quarantine of sorts
where those who are deemed socially ill are removed
from society and denied movement, enrichment, and
experience.  If life is to be seen as nothing more
than a series of experiences, then some may argue that
prison can be a removal from the living.  Jack Abbot
once said, "[prison] is like death because it denies
you experience."  If this statement is true then I can
only relate to it in the sense that my removal from
life has allowed me to look at it like a spectator
looks at a painting, artwork, or better yet like mass
theater: a participatory art to which we all play a
role.  I picked one of these leaves up in my hand and
looked at it closely.  Each vein, each stipple, each
stem, each dot where stomata once exchanged oxygen for
carbon dioxide; there were only so many things I could
see with my eyes, but countless more I could see in
"my mind's eye."  Feelings, unanswered mysteries, and
brilliance are wrapped up in a brittle little piece of
Carolina Beech foliage.

The brilliance that something so delicate, so often
seen as infinitesimal (if seen at all) could play the
essential role of breathing life into a tree that
stands tall and strong, of acting as an interface
between the tree and the sun digesting it's complex
radiation, and coupling it with lucid carbon and water
to make sugars and energy for the tree to grow, for
fruit to swell and fall to the ground or into
children's hands, or for the sap that a young grrl
pours on her pancakes as she laughs with her parents
over breakfast conversation.  What could have been
crushed under the feet of the next passer-by instead
wiggled in the breeze while resting in my hands.  It
was a a promissory note that miracles happen.
"Kites", as prisoners call them, are notes that make
it out of segregation to the prisons general populous
or pass from one institution to another.  This leaf
was a kite flown in from life to the land of the dead,
it read:

I am a small miracle.
I made a tree that people climbed,
Where a raccoon took nest,
Where birds perched on limbs sang out countless
Symphonies.
I am a small miracle.
What are you?

I held the leaf with the tenderness of a parent first
holding their newborn child.  I wondered if  I had
ever "met" a miracle before.  How many times have I
heard these words, "we can get (such and such) done,
but it's gonna take a small miracle"?  Well here was
the small miracle ready to be cashed in, in exchange
for success in another project long since abandoned
and viewed as hopeless...

Ask yourself, do I believe in miracles?  Then bend
your hand back and see the silhouette of the veins
running under the skin of your wrists.  You are a
woven series of structures and chemicals, automated,
living, and interactive.  You are art, perhaps the
most beautiful painting ever made.  Our societies are
like theater, a participatory art to which we each are
involved; each individually beautiful woven chemical
portrait singing a chorus like a family of birds on
the branch of a beech tree.  You are a miracle.  You
wield incredible power to build and heal, to breathe
life, like leaves, into starving structures.  Your
letters to me are like those leaves blown over the
prison walls the way they put hope in my hands.  They
are silhouettes in ink and loose leaf of your
miraculous selves.

Where my present life is a sea of asphalt, razor
wires, and electric fencing robbing me of my senses,
your life is inundated by a neon billboard wonderland
constantly distracting your senses with messages like;
"you are not thin enough", "note rich enough",
"nothing without this product", "anything but a
miracle"...  Liberation of self happens when one
shakes loose of those distractions, to see that you
are beautiful if your own shape, money does not make
you rich, commodities don't define you, and that
without rebut you are a miracle.  When you look at
yourself as a miracle, miracles begin to happen around
you.  The projects you once set aside for the
eventuality of one day encountering a small miracle
become reality.  I say this because at some point in
my life I set out to do what some would consider
impossible.  The SHAC-USA case showed us that
corporate America was devastated by the notion that a
handful of bright eyes people could use the same
constitutionally protected resources awarded to all of
us and derail their agendas.  They viewed it as
impossible and were shocked when it happened.  Many of
SHAC's supporters thought it impossible, or at best
would require a small miracle, but miracles do happen.
  For a mink pleading for someone to lift up the
opening to his fur farm cage, for an egg laying hen in
a battery farm, for a Beagle in a vivisection lab
sitting in her own congealed blood and vomit, the
person who opens the cage and introduces them to
freedom is a living, breathing, walking miracle.

As I reflect from prison I realize that this was just
the tip of the iceberg.  Inspiration is contagious.
So as I sit and write and press leaves on paper I make
attempts to re-route this process, to breathe life
back out past these walls and into your hands, to show
you *I'm not dead...I don't even have the wind knocked
out of me*, to fly a kite of my own...  Let it read: I
believe in miracles, because I see one in you.  There
is no mountain too high or valley too low.  There is
nothing that you cannot do.

Love and Liberation,

Andy

Write to Andy at:

Andrew Lloyd Stepanian #26399-050
FCI Butner Medium II
PO Box 1500
Butner, NC 27509