I once read a story about a farmer who grew excellent quality corn.  She’d won many a Blue Ribbon for Best Grown Corn.  One year, a reporter asked what her secret to success was.  She grinned and said, “I share my seed corn with my neighbors.”

The stunned reporter said, “What!  How can you risk sharing your best seed corn with your neighbors, when you know they’ll be competing against you next year?”  What the farmer then explained illustrates a life lesson for me.

“Don’t you know?  The wind lifts pollen from ripening corn and swirls it from field to field.  If my neighbor grows inferior corn, cross-pollination will steadily degrade the quality of my corn.  If I am to grow good corn, I must help my neighbors grow good corn.”

So it is with our lives.  We all have something to offer.  It may be a gift or talent we were born with or picked up along the way, or something we studied and practiced and honed.  It could be an athletic ability or the gift of poetry.  One might be able to draw anything they see or read the body language of others so well they can perceive what’s not being said.  We’ve all seen people with refined skills teach their secrets and hard-earned wisdom to others… and we all know stingy folks who’d take a secret recipe for chili to the grave. 

As editor of Compassion, a national newsletter written by and for people incarcerated on Death Row, I’ve had the privilege of working with hundreds of writers.  Some live in the same prison unit as me; we started on this literary journey together about ten years ago.  In 2013, the prison offered a creative writing class to the 140 or so men here on Death Row in North Carolina.  Twenty of us signed up, though only a few had graduated high school and could actually write a proper sentence.  Yet, over the course of its five-year lifespan, the class was mostly facilitated by professors from Duke University and UNC, along with professional journalists, novelists, and poets.  We were in awe of these highly skilled people and didn’t understand why they were ‘lowering’ themselves for guys like us.  Why waste their gifts?  They said, “We believe in you.  We’ve had opportunities and advantages you didn’t.  So, now we want to offer some to you.”  It reminds me of how NBA stars might volunteer at basketball camps for teens:  It speaks to seeing the universality of human potential in even the least of us, the young, the wayward and uneducated.  It’s about giving back, remembering that people greater than themselves helped them attain greatness.

Similarly, I have a friend on the outside who is a professional writer, editor, poet – she can do it all.  She’s befriended budding writers in prison, and she corresponds with them, teaches them how to refine their craft, helps them to see their own potential and provides practical support to facilitate achievement.  She finds publishing opportunities, types up their manuscripts, submits their work online (even paying the submission fees) since we have no computer access in prison.  Without such support from people like her on the outside, it is impossible for incarcerated writers to succeed.  I’ve asked her why she does it, and she’s said, “It’s in my heart to help people, and this is what I have to offer.  I just want to do my part.”

But we don’t have to be experts to do our part, to give of ourselves.  Among the volunteers who make Compassion possible, none are writing professionals.  Rather, they donate time, money, energy, and labor to sustain this outlet.  Each gives what they can.  A couple type all the issues, someone else formats it, a few fundraise (Compassion is a nonprofit), etc.  Of the writings themselves, most of the submissions I receive are handwritten, barely legible, and undeveloped as stories, essays, and poems, as most of the writers are uneducated, the same way I was when I joined the writing class here.  However, Compassion is a defacto writing class for them.  It can be instructive for the contributors when they compare their original submission to their edited version once it’s published.  They also get to see the more polished contributions from highly skilled writers, which shows them what can be done if they keep practicing.

Of the twenty of us who joined the writing class here, seven stuck with it and became established writers, winning national awards and publishing books, essays, and poems.  Several founded mentorship programs in collaboration with people on the outside.  All were transformed because people invested in us, believed in us, helped us believe in ourselves.

It reminds me that we are all interconnected, and whether active or passive, we influence the world around us in a sort of social cross-pollination.  If we wish to truly live well and meaningfully, we must help enrich the lives of others.  The welfare of one is tangled with the welfare of ALL:  like it or not, we are in this together.  The fact is, none of us truly wins until we all win.  Humanity is a race, but not the kind that lines us up against each other with only one winner.  Rather, this race – HUMANITY – unites us.  When we overemphasize individualism, “looking out for #1”, personal liberty, etc., we get exactly that – a bunch of lovely disconnected individuals.  Too much individualism dehumanizes us, because humans are social creatures.  The Golden Rule speaks to balancing selfish and selfless concern; we are to love our neighbors as we love ourselves, not just promote one over the other.

Whether we know it or not, we are part of something bigger, something that transcends our subdivisions of gender, class, race, religion, age, political party.  Life, the fulfilled life, is all about relationships – between us and God, and us and each other.  Humans are not meant to be alone; we live symbiotically with others. Love is the nutritive force that keeps everything growing and producing a high-quality harvest, making humanity better as a race.  Our differences are not designed to divide us, but to offer openings for us to pour ourselves into one another’s lives, to be enriched by each other, and to impart value by gifting us all with something special to bring to the feast.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR.  George Wilkerson lives on Death Row in NC. He inspires me. When you work with people who live in prison long enough, you get to know some who make you hope to be just as loving as them. George is one of the people that makes me aspire to show his level of kindness. He is also an accomplished poet, writer and artist. He is the author of Interface and Bone Orchard, as well as co-author of Inside and Beneath Our Numbers. And, as discussed, he is the editor of Compassion. More of his work can be found at katbrodie.com/georgewilkerson/.

George Wilkerson can be contacted at:

George T. Wilkerson #0900281
Central Prison
P.O. Box 247
Phoenix, MD 21131

He can also be contacted via textbehind.com