Travelling

I'm reflecting today, because in lieu of class, I'm travelling, once again, the long road between home and home. It's a good day to reflect; fitting, I mean, because it feels like I've been travelling, on a journey (if you will pardon the cliche), over the course of this class. Fitting too, to say that I'm travelling between home and home, because I live geographically in two places the same way that maybe I live in the law as my profession and outside of that I have my own politics, morals and personal values and I'm always travelling between the two, trying to reconcile them, make them known to each other and living harmoniously. It's not always an easy task, in the literal or metaphorical sense.

A course like this seems like an act of reconciliation between them, because it's been about connections and connecting. Connecting theories of restorative justice to our own experience through practice; and connecting our own expecience to those of the people in our circle. From that, I think, has come some reconciliation for me.

We don't often get the chance in law school to reveal pieces of ourselves to our colleagues because we're concerned with learning very carefully selected facts, which support rules developed over time designed to result in very carefully constructed conclusions, that too often serve the interests of a select few but disguised as something called "justice", which is theoretically good for everyone.

We come in to law school, frequently, maybe even often, with a sense of idealism (even if we pretend we don't), and they try to make us forget that using a variety of strategies. Chief among those, I believe, is the tendency to dehumanize and to ignore the people who have made the law, all of the people who are subject to the law and all of the people who suffer the law.

But here, we got to take some risks. We got to be the people we are and tell our stories. On day four, I was really angry and upset. But the process gave me a space and some tools to understand why I was upset and also why I should move past that and stay engaged. The circle allowed me to make a choice to stay involved. In a lecture, we would have just moved on and I would have gone home and judged and never changed that judgment. But, day after day in the circle, I was really required to look at that judgment, unpack it, question it and, I think eventually, to let it go.

I think I need to carry that memory with me as I go into practice.