Sometimes, when I want to post but can’t think of anything that moves me enough to make me want to write about it, I come back to “Noise Reduction” and spend some time thinking about what that means to me right then.  The title, like any good title, is my anchor, and today, as I reflected away, I found that what I was most aware of was a din inside my head that has, for what seems like weeks now (I wrote “Lost in Space” after I’d already been feeling lost, and spacey, for some time), incapable of concentrating on any one thought for long, feeling any one feeling with strength, writing even one sentence with conviction.  For a while I thought it was a symptom of seasonal transition; but Spring is well-settled now and I’m still feeling floaty.  Sometimes I wonder if it has something to do with the childlike nature of the way I spend much of my time.  My Hobbit – he doesn’t do a lot of analyzing or reflecting.  He just experiences life, and life, at least his life, is not very complicated.  Joyous, hilarious, interesting, sad, maybe confusing, sure – but not complicated.  We go to the Top of the World Park and run around on the empty basketball court in the rain.  It’s great.  We go to the zoo and say “Hi Giraffy!” to a lanky, sunbathing giraffe, visit the gorillas, run over to the monkeys then eat hot dogs while watching flamingos walk back and forth along a path for no reason we can figure.  We love it.  While folding laundry, we make up a song about the Husband’s abundance of socks and sing it loudly, cracking ourselves right up.  We sing our chicken soup song as we make our chicken soup then slurp it up three hours later saying yummmm.

Maybe.  Maybe it’s that.

And maybe there is another factor: time.  For me, just conceiving of a project takes time, and getting traction on a project takes even more time.  They take time and concentration.  And so do reflection, and idea-exploration, and the process of massaging reflections and reactions in search of kernels of wisdom and insight.  It all takes time, and right now, on average, I have about enough quiet time to begin conceiving of projects.  And  that’s the way it’s going to be for a while, unless I give up sleep which, as a reformed insomniac, I won’t do.

So, along those lines, here’s something that jumped out at me this week.  Something I haven’t quite had time enough to explore as I would like.  On Thursday, there were three brief news reports in my paper, each about prison.  One, was about Lori Berenson, a woman my age who was put in prison in Peru thirteen years ago after a trial before hooded judges.  At the time, she was associating with members of the violent revolutionary group MRTA and was charged with being a  leader of the group and therefore a traitor.  I’ve watched her story through the years, and even read a book about her written by her mom.  I always related to Lori in a way, probably because we are the same age, and because around the time she was arrested, I had many friends who were working for justice for poor people in Latin America.  The most recent news?  She had a baby in prison.

The second story was about a message found in a bottle buried underground in Poland.  In Auschwitz to be precise.  The message was written on material torn from a cement bag by six prisoners of Auschwitz who, in 1944, were forced to work building a bunker for the German military.  The prisoners were sure they were going to die in the camp and wanted to leave something of themselves behind, so they wrote their names and numbers on the material.  Several of them survived the camps, a couple are still alive.  You can read about them here.

The third brief was about Roxana Saberi, the American-Iranian reporter who was arrested in Tehran in January and has been in prison since.  She is a freelance reporter who works for NPR and the BBC among other outlets, and in a one-hour trial held behind closed doors she was charged with spying for the U.S.  The report was about her decision to stop a hunger strike because of health reasons.

What was stirred in me by these stories was an awareness of a paradox of prison life, which is that in prison, life simultaneously stops and keeps going.  I have a friend who was a political prisoner in Turkey for a decade.  She was arrested when she was 18 and released when she was 28.  During those ten years, she was all but completely cut off from the outside world and her life as she knew it simply stopped.  Her university years, stopped.  A career, nonexistent.  Yet, within prison, a strange and usually horrible life went on, and that was what I was reminded of by these three stories.

And that’s that.  I’d like to have more to say about it, but I can’t quite get my head focused enough to corral my thoughts into coherence.  Maybe another day.

In the meantime, I’ll note that Roxana Saberi’s appeal trial is scheduled for tomorrow.  Oh, how I hope that it will go in her favor and that soon she will be free to start her life again.  What a glorious mother’s day gift that would be for her mom.