After I had been working in San Quentin for about a year, I began to recognize my own gradual but deep awakening to the suffering and injustice that I had experienced over the past twelve months. This recognition was the fruit of my dropping my guard enough to get to know the men in prison. It took time to get to know them–me to know them and them to know me. Race, class and economic differences evaporated as we spent time with each other, getting past the idea of one another and connecting with who we really are. I had begun to feel a solidarity, a kinship with these men, and I came to realize that the course of these men’s lives, perhaps more than any other group in America,  reflected our society’s shadow and lack of heart. Our society’s belief that gain and consumption are the basis for happiness has so distorted our view that we have all but completely forsaken that which connects us as human beings–our shared reality of belonging together and needing each other.

One night I had a dream. In it, I saw the majestic, sweeping vista of the American plains. Into view came a buffalo, a huge mighty bull, snorting and scraping its front hooves impatiently, pummeling the earth. It would walk one direction, stop as if to orient, then turn and go back. It would start in another direction, and again, stop, turn, and start again. The bull’s behavior was puzzling. He repeated this over and over in all four directions. There was a tragic quality to this–the plains seemed so infinite, so quiet, the bull so majestic, so alone. Suddenly, I felt the poignancy of this scene from the heart of the great bull. It was lost. It was searching for the herd–but there was no longer a herd. It was gone. There was only the lone bull standing amidst the great plain surrounded by a dusty, howling wind and an eerie silence.

I awoke with a great sense of urgency and longing, feeling the essence but not knowing yet what the dream meant. Over and over again I replayed the dream in my mind, searching for meaning. I closed my eyes…all the buffalo had been killed, the bull was alone; he was trying to connect with the herd.

Then, in a start it came to me–the life of the herd was gone. Hundreds of thousands of hooves used to drum the membrane of this nation alive with this message of herd, with belonging together.

Just as our forefathers killed the spirit of the buffalo by destroying the herd, we as a society are losing the spirit of kindness, of compassion, of caring by losing our sense of community and connectedness. We are losing that which makes us feel we belong together, the force that bonds and teaches us of our sameness, our common life, the purpose for existence. We are no longer tending to our sense of being “part of the herd”.

I cried. I wept tears for feeling my own pain and loneliness. I wept for my own longing to be part of a herd that lives according to the laws of love and respect. I thought of my family, my two beautiful boys, my lovely wife, and felt tremendous gratitude for being part of it. But it was not enough. Something was missing. And in that vacuum I suddenly knew that I had to do something. And so I resolved to redirect my efforts into creating a movement, a movement that would hold a lamp up in one of the dark places in our culture, a place where we discard human beings, label them as our prisoners and forget about them. A movement built upon the belief that we can only find our human dignity in caring for each other. Or, as one incarcerated person put it once: “You make a living through what you get, but you have a life through what you give.”

And so my commitment to creating this prison movement was born.

Jacques Verduin, Founder
GRIP Training Institute was born out of the work of Insight–Out.