Through the years of Truth Be Told work, there have been several women in our classes that have stood out in my memory because of their amazing positive attitudes. Frequently, they have become mentors the next semester. These are students who have completed a Talk to Me class but wish to retake the class with a different level of homework assignments, and an agreement to serve as helpers to the facilitator and role model/guides to the newer class members.

Not one has moved and surprised me more than Karen C. She was in Carol’s first Talk to Me Circle class at Hilltop prison in Gatesville in 2010. The next semester, she attended my Talk to Me Speaking class. Then in fall of 2011, she became a mentor in Carol’s class. And last semester, spring of 2012, she was a mentor in my class.  Since she’d already done the Mentor homework, we created a special Mentor of Mentors homework assignment for her—leaning heavily on the arts, since Karen is a passionately joyful and playful artist. My favorite thing about her is the radiant smile that lights up her cheeks and makes her eyes sparkle like sunlight on rippling water, and her bountiful regard for the women who are her classmates.

It is always welcome but not very unusual for our class members to love and respect their facilitators. It is unusual for class members to deeply delight in and show respect for each and every member of every class. Karen, who is shy, but has emerged from that shyness each semester to a greater degree, simply beams when she’s asked if there’s anything she’d like to say after class members have spoken their speeches or drawn their illustrations or shared their thoughts in class. She then pours forth her respect and gratitude for being in the company of such amazingly courageous women in white.

Every semester, she evokes all the class members to sign something that she has painted to give to her facilitator and any facilitators in training, demonstrating their gratitude for the volunteers who come in to serve them.  She has been struggling with illness and back and forth several times in last year to the Carole Young Unit—a medical prison. Truly, the room seemed dimmer when her smile was missing. But when she has returned from medical leave, cheeks hollower than before, tanned skin a bit wan under her white uniform, ponytail skinned back—her face sends out the warmth of the sun to greet us all.

The two classes she mentioned, Masks and Wise Woman, come in the Discovery Level 2, which she has now done four times.  In those classes, the Talk to Me Circle and Speaking classes join into one community and do more creativity (artwork, movement, guided imagery, writing in response to poetry and photos) as they go deeper into the life of someone no longer running from family secrets and past misdeeds. In the Masks class, the women often end up on the floor with their crayons, craypas, colored pencils, and markers as they color the masks of the self they were and the self they want to be. Karen’s masks are differently illustrated every time—and in spring 2012, her mysterious wide open eyes illustrated the cover of the Book of Wisdom of Hilltop Women.

The other exercise she mentioned in her letter from Carole Young Unit refers to a class where after a guided imagery where the women meet their older but wiser selves on a quiet beach, they return to write a letter to themselves from the Older but Wiser woman within, who is now available to guide them on the rest of their journey through prison and in the outside world. We are attempting to help them see that the woman they long to “grow up to be” is already planted within them, and the more they listen to “her” instead of to the discouraging and demeaning voices around them, the more they will become her, in reality and in the eyes of their families and friends, a contributing citizen of any community of which they are part. This is true already of Karen C.  She is a blessing to every person who knows her, deeply loved by her children and parents as well as her class members and TBT facilitators.

Thanks for letting me write about her —I am lit from within, each time I think of her radiance.