Winnie Lim

Lisa had once likened his cell in San Quentin to a monk’s cell in a state-sponsored retreat. She was joking, but he reflected on it again now. “It’s true,” he said. “It’s been a place to contemplate and study, to sit with all these new ideas and turn them around in my head and practice integrating them into my life. I never would have done any of that. I wouldn’t have looked at my past, that scary shit—I’d still be running from it.”

After that Jarvis was placed in nine foster homes and three boys’ homes, including some in which he was starved, beaten, and kept in squalor. At thirteen, he was moved from the foster care system into the division of juvenile justice, where the brutal treatment escalated. When he was arrested for petty crimes—stealing a bicycle, joyriding—he was placed in youth detention centers, where he was subjected to more beatings, burned, locked in closets, and made to pummel other boys. If he refused, counselors beat him harder.

The lama spoke again. “You may not understand now, but it is your karma to be here,” he said. “I said you are fortunate. As hard as it is to accept, this is where you have to be now. You may not see it, but you are fortunate to be in a place where you can know humanity’s suffering and learn to see the perfection of all beings and yourself. Learn to see their perfection.”

Once Jarvis said, “People always talk about their perfect meditation cushions, and sometimes I think it would be nice to have one, but maybe people without a cushion are luckier.” She asked him to explain. “I’ve never had a cushion in my life,” he said. “I’ve been on the cold, hard floor. It’s not comfortable, but it’s like the lady in the story, the one who knocked on a thousand doors. One hundred fifty years of pain in San Quentin has been absorbed into these floors. You talk about experiencing the suffering of all people. This is where it is, and I feel it all.”

On the first page, the lama described death as a subject people often ignore or think about frivolously, as if it were no big deal. Then the author wrote, “This is a nice theory until one is dying. Then experience and theory differ.” He continued, “Then one is powerless and everything familiar is lost. One is overwhelmed by a great turbulence of fear, disorientation, and confusion. For this reason it is essential to prepare well in advance for the moment when the mind and body separate.”

She marveled at his story. Beyond the solid writing, she saw it as a remarkable testament to how far he’d come since they’d met. Then he’d had no self-awareness, never mind the ability to see others. He cared about no one and nothing but himself. Now he recognized others’ suffering, responded with compassion, and connected others’ pain with his own. Melody had a thought that made her smile. On his own and without knowing it, Jarvis had arrived at the heart of Buddhism.

Jarvis’s self-imposed training began each day with two hours of meditation followed by exercise. He recorded his progress on a calendar he’d drawn. Four hundred sit-ups, five hundred push-ups, five hundred or more burpees, and again. Next he walked up and down the length of his cell 520 times, which was a mile.

Jarvis noticed sounds he’d lived with but never heard: the scrape of a food cart’s wheels along the corridor, the jangling rhythm of keys and handcuffs clanging off the belts of guards who passed his cell, the scurry of a mouse, and the babel of radio stations tuned to country, metal, and blues, wailing preachers and NPR. That heightened awareness filtered into his meditation. He noticed his surroundings: feelings, noises, smells. But even more intensely, he felt a new world of sensation inside his body. He discovered the tightness in his belly, the alternating tautness and slack of his lungs, the stress that throbbed in his temples, the pulsing weight of anxiety in his chest. When he described those sensations to Melody, she said he was discovering mindfulness, a form of meditation. “You become fully present in the moment. Experience it. When your mind wanders, return to your body, what you sense outside and inside you, and breathe.”

“You meet a whole new person when you start writing about yourself,” he wrote Melody.

Paper was at a premium; in order to get as many words on each page as possible, he developed a tiny, even script that looked almost like typing. Sometimes he wrote all night. He never imagined there was something he could be good at, a talent, and being inspired to do something constructive—being inspired at all—was a new feeling. Writing gave him a different kind of power than came from knives or guns—subtler but no less palpable.