CONTAINED

BY TRACY SCHLAPP

This week, we have had our eye on the weather. Stretches of road between our workshops from Portland to Pendleton and all the way to Ontario become treacherous with winter snow and ice. We made it to Pendleton on Wednesday, but dicey roads kept us from continuing the three hours to Snake Rive Correctional Facility on Thursday. It’s important to travel these winding rural roads, to be face-to-face with our writers — many of their family members can’t make the journey. It is a long way to travel, and we always find it time well spent. This week’s agenda filled with planned routes and schedules, a new lesson plan, the all-wheel drive vehicle prepped with winter gear … we were ready! And yet, our well-planned journey was thwarted by the icy pass. This got me thinking about the tension of containment — being contained and trying to contain.

Fernando Pelayo Brambila’s riddle Give Me A Voice to Raise Awareness plays with the way water circulates, defines, limits, and expands:
When you attempt to capture me, I tend to vanish.
Air, wind, heat, gravity, and condensation are my companions.
To your benefit, I ascend and descend and decorate your land
I cycle and transform the entire globe.

When we spoke about Nature (Revised), Jai described the importance of the potted plant garden he grows in his duties as clerk to the Chaplain. Folks climb five echoing flights of concrete stairs to worship. They are called up that flight of steps to take a phone call, most often with bad news from home. The plants soften the space, a soothing energy, and solace — pockets of nature where life can flourish:
Looking longingly from within the mountain, through sheets
of melted sand, I see that nature is in the palm of my hand
as I propagate another pot full of soil and seed.

I notice that nature is the place where I find it, and
the spider doesn't care that her web is hanging from an iron bar
or that her babies are hatched into a concrete crevice.

Phillip Luna IV describes his job facilitating the beekeeping program at Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution in his piece My Felon-Friendly Apiary: “The beehives are near a garden with rows of bee balm, lavender and a few dwarf honey crisp apple trees. But the perimeter of their sanctuary is surrounded by a 4-foot-tall, chain-link fence and the bees are under the watchful eye of an armed guard tower.” Bees travel 1-2 miles from their hives to search for food, which means that they can circulate outside of the garden, past the chain-link fencing and razor wire, up and over the guard tower.

Form a cup from your hands and you will draw enough water to wet your lips. Scoop the water with a cup and you quench your thirst. Fall into the ocean and you are contained by the endless water. | TDS