Finding Meaning In Difficult Circumstances — Marcus Houston Falsely in Prison

Photo by Tim Photoguy on Unsplash

It was in the early hours of the morning when he couldn’t sleep that Marcus Houston experienced his most powerful thoughts. He contemplated many things, from what he had read to moments in his life. He was always grateful that he had survived another day. This night, he was thinking about all those falsely imprisoned before him, from St. Paul to Solzhenitsyn, especially those in prisons far worse than his around the world. He knew his suffering couldn’t hold a candle to any of these. He contemplated all the things that he missed: walks in the park, listening to music, eating apple pie, watching the wind blow through leaves on trees, the sound of birds singing, a cool rain after a hard day’s work, when children laugh, when toddlers smile, a thousand beautiful details that in his life before prison he had overlooked. And he knew that the devils and all their soldiers could not destroy all the beautiful things about the world, that even in the midst of horrific wars and plagues, there were still things of beauty, and these things inspired him! He thought about twelve men who had died in the two years he had been inside. He was determined to remember their names and faces. He began to recite their names every night, “Martin Rivers, Jose Calderon, Felix Hernandez, Ricardo Saenz, Alex Rodriguez, Peter Birch, Antonio Vincenzo, Arturo Bernal, Edward Richardson, Terrence Frank, Nicolai Andreyev and Simon Birnbaum.” He was determined to commit their names to memory. He had spoken directly to three of them: Edward Richardson, Jose Calderon, and Nicolai Andreyev. The others he learned about discreetly through other men.

He promised himself that one day he’d write it down, every memory, every impression, every hope and longing.

It was in these silent and still moments, when his mind was free, that he could finally see beyond the four small walls of his prison cell and get a small glimpse of the transcendent order that lay a hair’s breadth beneath the surface of things. He had come to understand that the thinnest slice of veneer covered the hidden connections of everything.

It was extraordinary, he reminded himself that despite several attempts on his life that he had survived, Marcus hoped to live long enough to catalogue all the beauty that, even in prison, he had experienced in his life!