Dorsey Nunn’s memoir asks: “What Kind of Bird Can’t Fly?” He spent ten years in San Quentin. Then he got out and built All of Us or None — the movement that led the Ban the Box campaign, now covering 230 million Americans. He helped end indefinite solitary confinement in California.
I am partial to this story because I know something about broken wings. I have a record. I know what it feels like to walk out of a facility and into a world that has permanently labeled you. To fill out job applications with a box that asks whether you’ve ever been convicted, knowing that box will often be the last thing anyone reads about you.
Father Greg Boyle has run Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles for decades — the largest gang rehabilitation program in the world. His work proceeds from a single conviction he calls kinship: the idea that no one is outside the circle of belonging. “Here is what we seek,” he writes, “a compassion that can stand in awe at what the poor have to carry rather than stand in judgment at how they carry it.” That posture — awe instead of judgment — is what makes transformation possible. The people at Homeboy who do the most effective work with the formerly incarcerated are almost always people who have been there themselves.
Joseph Goldstein at Insight Meditation Society teaches that “the sources of suffering and freedom are forces within our own minds.” Not permanent conditions. Forces in motion. Which means the person who entered a cell is not identical to the person who leaves it — unless we insist on making it so.
Ram Dass said it simply: “We’re all just walking each other home.” Dorsey walked himself home from San Quentin and then turned around and started clearing the path for everyone coming behind him. That’s what transformation looks like when it becomes purpose.
The bird can fly. The evidence is Dorsey Nunn. The question is whether anyone will believe it before the bird has to prove it entirely alone.
