Renewal
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We are blessed here in Texas to have nearly hundred-year-old live oaks inside our prison. We have double cyclone fences topped with razor wire and electronic sensors through the wires to remind us of where we are, but inside these wires and fencing we have rows upon rows of massive oaks.
Live oaks are not the tall and stately oaks sought after for building. Their limbs are crooked, and the trees about half the height of the builder’s dream.
Instead, they are as bent as many of those they shade as they spread wide and provide cooling protection from the hot Texas sun. Over their many decades they have provided shade for tuberculosis patients, for the mentally ill who were too often sent here and forgotten, and now for the men and women incarcerated here, whose minds and lives have been as twisted with fear and sickness as have the oaks that have offered their shade to all who found respite here.
Like those beneath their shade, they have suffered from the storms and lightnings of their lives. But as winter comes on, storms blow through them, loosening thousands of acorns that fall upon the ground. Many even fall outside the cyclone fencing, untouched by the razor wire—fall through without alarms, to be free outside.
Shiny, new, perfect acorns that nourish life when winter blows, and in the spring, when the sun warms them and the skies water them, they bring forth new oaks. Not oaks bearing the scars of their parents, not the oaks twisted from the storms and winds, not the oaks scarred by what life has brought them, but perfect, unscarred oaks ready to meet life’s challenges.
These oaks have seen much renewal of life over their near hundred years—life that grows to provide shade for all. Life renewed….
- The Eclipse of Our Lives - January 1, 2022
- Renewal - April 1, 2020
- Restorative Justice - April 1, 2019
