Continued Thoughts

I'm not finished with the book. Here are some thoughts, lifted more or less directly from a letter I just wrote to a good friend on her way to Bogota, Colombia:

I'm just now finishing an essay by William P. Roberst Jr. I love the way he writes. Its sort of crazy and poetic, which I think fits pretty well with his actions. After more than a year in prison he got paroled to work in a hospital and wrote this to his still incarcerated pacifist friend Larry (the guy who put the book toether):

"In my first ramble among snow and trees I had a long talk with a terribly wise and ancient maple druid and he asked especially about you, Larry, and wanted to know what this conscription thing is that has the ghastly power to pin you to cement, where he can't talk with you. But druids know how to wait and I told him you do too."

Later he said: "Although there is much that hurts, there is so wonderfully much that sings - which, after all, is life."

This is also the guy who was initially in a minimum security prison and told the authorities that he was going to leave because he didn't want to be his own jailer. He was immediately transferred to a higher security setting. Then he was happily paroled in Boston for a bit but decided his life would be much more productive and meaningful it if were his own so he wrote to the parole board: "... I want to tell you that I no longer consider myself under the authority of the parole board." He was re-arrested. Who does such a thing? I feel like he must be either wise or crazy.

And lastly, the title of his essay is "Prison and Butterfly Wings". He says, "We flapped our butterfly wings in prison. Who can know their effect in our interconnected world?" What a wonderful, uplifting thought.

almost forgot - in following up a reference to Mann Act (the prisons had many conscientious objects but also men violating the Mann Act) I went to wikipedia and found this super interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mann_Act