On this particular day Gisela and I were talking about her upcoming release. Of course she was nervous. She was nervous about finding work. She was nervous about what her husband would do when she got out-he was in the DR, and they had what sounded like a tempestuous and tortured relationship. Gisela said she didn’t want to reunite with him, but he sounded like a person who was difficult to resist, and of course they had children together. I knew that Gisela had no money, and many responsibilities, and that she faced a massive number of unknown but looming challenges. But while she was quick to acknowledge that she was nervous, she also exhibited the peacefulness at her core, the loving calmness that made her the kind of person to whom everyone was drawn. And then she started to talk about God.

Normally, professions of faith or discussions of religion in prison would win eye-rolling and a quick exit from me. I believed that everyone should be able to practice according to their own preferences and beliefs, but an awful lot of pilgrims in prison seem to be making it up as they go along, in silly ways-wearing a contraband napkin on their head one month when they’re practicing Islam, and then appearing in the Buddhist meditation circle the next-after realizing that they could duck out of work for this new brand of religious observance. Couple that with a pretty reliable volume of ignorance about the rest of the world’s faiths (“Well, the Jews did kill Jesus… everyone knows that!”), and I generally didn’t want any part of it.

Gisela wasn’t talking about religion or church or even Jesus, though. She was talking about God. And when she talked about God, she looked so happy. She spoke so freely, and so easily, about how God had helped her through all the struggles in her life, and especially the years she had spent in prison; how she knew that God loved her completely, and watched over her, and gave her the peace of mind, the good sense, the clarity to be a good person, even in a bad place. She said that she trusted God to help her, by sending her angels like Noni Delgado to care for her children, and good friends when she most needed them to help her survive prison. She glowed while she talked calmly and quietly about God and how much His love had given her.

I was startled to feel so moved by what Gisela had to say, and I listened quietly. Some of her beliefs weren’t stated all that differently from the scuttlebutt I had heard from the holy rollers in the Camp, but their protestations of faith were imbued with the need for redemption-Jesus loves me even if I’m a bad person, even if no one else does. Gisela already knew about love. She was talking about an unshakable faith that gave her real strength and that she had carried for a long time. She wasn’t talking about repentance or forgiveness, only love. What Gisela was describing to me was an exquisitely intimate and happy love. I thought it was the most compelling description of faith that I had ever heard. I wasn’t about to grab a Bible; nor was our conversation about me or my choices in any way. It was food for thought.

I had long recognized that faith helped people understand their relationship to their community. In the best cases it helped women in Danbury focus on what they had to give instead of what they wanted. And that was a good thing. So for all my scoffing at “holy rollers,” was it such a bad thing if faith helped someone understand what others needed from them, rather than just thinking about themselves?

In prison, for the first time, I understood that faith could help people see beyond themselves, not into the abyss but into the street, into the mix, to offer what was best about themselves to others. I grew to this understanding by way of knowing people like Sister, Yoga Janet, Gisela, and even my holy-roller pedicurist Rose.

Rose, chatting in the midst of a pedicure one day, told me what she had learned from her faith; I thought later that hers were the most powerful words a person could utter: “I’ve got a lot to give.”

I HAD added frustrations, and my methods for dealing with them met with obstacles at every turn. The track was now closed after the four P.M. count. After work I would race back to the Camp, change into my sneakers, and run furiously until count time, cutting it closer and closer and stressing out most of B Dorm. I would look up from the far side of the track and see Jae frantically beckoning me, and I would run at top speed up the rickety steps and through C Dorm to my cube, other prisoners urging me to hurry.

“Pipes, you going to fuck up the four o’clock count, get your ass sent to the SHU!” Delicious admonished from the other side of B Dorm.

“Bunkie, you cutting it close.” Natalie would shake her head.

Best case, I was only getting in about six miles on a weekday. I tried to make it up on the weekend, running ten miles around the quarter-mile track on Saturdays and Sundays, but that didn’t help with my daily tides of stress and anxiety about things and people I could not control.

So I started doing more yoga. Initial interest in keeping the yoga class going had surged a bit, but a number of the new adherents (Amy, cursing and squealing with every pose) didn’t last long. Ghada still appeared occasionally to stretch beside me, crooning at me affectionately, but I didn’t have any decent Spanish or Janet’s soothing yogi presence, and she never dozed off with me. Camila would come and do a tape with me sometimes on the weekend, and she was still radiant good company (and could arch into a backbend next to mine), but she was preoccupied with her impending departure to the drug program down the hill. It was mainly me and Rodney Yee.

I got into the habit of rising at five, checking carefully to be sure that the morning count was complete-boots thudding, flashlight beams bobbing, keys sometimes jangling if the CO didn’t care enough to hold them still. I’d stand silently in my cube, hoping to startle them and make them jump. Natalie would already be gone to the kitchen to bake. I would revel in the complete darkness of B Dorm, listening to forty-eight other women breathe in a polyrhythm of deep sleep as I prepared the right measures of instant coffee, sugar, and Cremora. It was warm and peaceful in B Dorm, as I slithered through the warren of cubicles to the hot water dispenser. Occasionally I would see someone else awake-we would nod or sometimes murmur to each other. Steaming mug in hand, I would slip out of the building into the bracing cold and down to the gym to commune with the VCR and Rodney. In the perfect privacy of the empty gym, my body would slowly awaken and warm on the cold rubber floor, my head and heart stayed calmer longer, and the value of Yoga Janet’s teaching became clearer every day. I missed her terribly, and yet she had given me a gift that allowed me to cope without her.

In the last ten months I had found ways to carve out some sense of control of my world, seize some personal power within a setting in which I was supposed to have none. But my grandmother’s illness sent that sense spinning away, showed me how much my choices eleven years earlier and their consequences had put me in the power of a system that would be relentless in its efforts to take things away. I could choose to assign very little value to the physical comforts I had lost; I could find the juice and flair in who and what was precious in my current surroundings. But nothing here could substitute for my grandmother, and I was losing her.

ON A gray afternoon I was whipping around the track, pushing myself to keep at a seven-minute-mile speed. Mrs. Jones had given me a digital wristwatch that she never used, and I paced myself relentlessly with it. The weather was crap, it was going to rain. Jae appeared at the top of the hill, gesturing to me urgently. I looked at the watch and saw that it was only 3:25, thirty-five minutes until count time. What did she want?