Still Sundays

August 15th.

What do you know beyond a reasonable doubt? Psyche & The City. “What has been blown away, cannot be found.” Calm Madness.

If you would like to know what Still Sundays is about, please take a quick gander here and just read the third paragraph. Thanks.

Back in New York. My affinity for the City is not just because of the obvious; in fact, it is the subtleties which draw me in. The complexity, paradox, the buzz of it all. Yes, found all places where humans exist but New York boasts it. Here you are challenged to really see beyond the obvious. Every. Single. Moment. And some don’t. I do. It is not always a pleasure. It is on a Sunday morning.

Artist Sarah McLachlan’s lyrics from “Elsewhere” are precisely representative of this invisible, yet very present, tranquility I find within the chaos of New York.

I love the time and in between
the calm inside me in the space where I can breathe

I believe there is a distance I have wandered
to touch upon the years of reaching out and reaching in

holding out holding in

I believe this is heaven to no one else but me
and I’ll defend it as long as I can be
left here to linger in silence
if I choose to
would you try to understand

I am drunk in my desire. A whirling dervish I am still inside some swirling madness.

The amazing Heide Kolb on twitter (@heidiko44)  shared a link to a book, Psyche and the City.  Always grateful to serendipity orchestrated by twitter. This topic is very relevant to my research for my work-in-progress manuscript titled Her Sizwe. Besides I really am curious for another perspective besides my own on the pull to return to certain cities.  Again. And again. I will be getting the book.

I entertained the possibility of taking on this project for an education not-for-profit organization. At the end of a very long and demanding meeting I later learned that this one woman had concluded I am “more of a lawyer than an educator.”  Usually I am offended by such a remark.  I hate boxes—unless they are wooden keepsake ones. My heart palpitates at the idea of boxing someone in or being confined by a label myself.  But I am sympathetic—the world needs boxes to understand, like a child learning to walk, holding onto rails, hands, walls, anything. Except, somewhere along the way, in assisting the child we often enable him or her to remain dependent on what he or she no longer needs.

“Lawyer.” Synonym for unfair, doublespeak, and shrewdly analytical. Yet, that day, for the first time, I felt a sense of pride instead of offense by that generalization. That perplexed me. Was it really true that once trained in the field of law you can never be the same? Was I proud of an “us versus the rest of the naive world” elitism prevalent amongst even “human rights” lawyers?

My brain was mercury.  When exactly did you fall out of love with the law? Have you? Moments in life seem to drizzle, drip, and spiral so I savor when I can pinpoint an exact infraction of a second where a colossal shift takes place. I had to serve as a juror on a murder trial here in New York City a year ago. The fact that the murder happened 15 blocks from my community, I was a former New York City Board of Education teacher, and currently worked for the legal system did not excuse me out of jury duty. Apparently I appeared objective both to the prosecution and the defense despite my attempts at highlighting my subjective opinions.

Not much evidence. Just one witness, a neighborhood drug dealer, who happened to be the victim, and record of Verizon phone calls made around the block where defendant shot the victim several times. Defendant had plead his right not to testify. The entire case came down to the jurors’ interpretation of beyond a reasonable doubt. The jury pool was indeed a slice of the average New Yorker from Manhattan: diverse, worldly, educated, cynical, and despite personal prejudices, tolerant.

Beyond a reasonable doubt.

We deliberated for a long excruciating ten days or around there. We argued. We made up. We wanted to leave. We wanted more time. The defendant was a handsome thirty year old African-American. We asked for trial transcripts and tore them apart. We decided one way and came back and decided another the next morning. We got angry at ourselves and each other. We—to the best of our understanding of the legal definition of ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’—got lost in semantics and personal experiences of doubt. What is reasonable? What is beyond? What is doubt? After all, the defendant had shot a neighborhood drug dealer who was going to walk free, and he was going in for however long. We didn’t know of the defendant’s past criminal acts. We later learned there were many and we had put him behind bars for good.

The jurors and I became pretty close by the end. We all exchanged emails. We all left silently. There was this one man with whom I have since lost touch who repeatedly said: this doesn’t add up. It didn’t. Given everything I knew intuitively, understood intellectually, and felt within a space that is even beyond intuition, I knew the defendant was not the shooter. But the prosecution had met its burden for beyond a reasonable doubt for all legal purposes.

I walked out into a humid New York City on Center Street and sat in a park nearby and cried never to shed another tear over it again. An Ethiopian-American woman walked up to me and handed me a tissue paper to wipe my tears. She asked me if I was Ethiopian and then inquired what happened. I mumbled I was no longer in love. I don’t know why I said that instead of the aforementioned account. She said she understood. And then added, “There is a saying in my country, ‘What has been blown away, cannot be found.'” Great. I was screwed beyond the law given everything else going on in my life at that point. She looked at me and further added, “But know you will fall in love again. If you want.” She wasn’t talking about the law.

I learned how to read long before I started formal schooling thanks to my grandfather.  Many do. Nothing special. But what the elders joke about is that I started teaching others as soon as I had learned something new.

I grew up listening to stories under a desert sky. I wrote my first and last complete short story, forty pages long, when I was eight years old.

I can say beyond a reasonable doubt I. will. write. no matter what and Her Sizwe is my burden and offering to the world.

There is no one setting to teach or learn.

What do you know beyond a reasonable doubt?

There is a calm madness in such knowing.

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