All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth!

Remember that song? Don't get me wrong. I have all my teeth. Nor do I wish to complain about DOC dental care. But when I fantasize about freedom, I do think about going to a dentist. I think it has something to do with deep cleaning.

I also think about hiking up into the hills and enjoying the intense stillness and solitude of a pine forest. Trees in Canada are different. They grow densely. Wild. You can't see much. It's all trees and the trees deaden--absorb--sound. In the winter, snow huffs and soughs. Ice cracks. Every noise seems louder.

In the spring, water rushes, gushes, gurgles. Ice melts. Geese honk. Spring is noisy and damp. So is autumn with the bugling elk, moose bellowing, all the deer families straining to reproduce. Animals seem to ululate in seasonal shifts.

Except in summer when only the occasional piercing caw of a crow or the raucous argument of a blue jay or the rumbling grunts of foraging black bears disrupt the woods. Summertime woods in Canada are absolutely quiet. I long for that silence. It has something to do with deep cleaning too.

My head feels cluttered. with people and noise and words and sound and otherness. I desperately need some mental dental floss to work through all the brain crevices and clean out all the gunk. Better yet, to feed a nice long flexible pipe cleaner in one ear and scrape and poke out all the dottle. There is nowhere to go in prison and have solitude or silence. There is always someone else. There is always noise.

One way I attempt to overcome the never-ending roar is with my fan that creates white noise and blocks out the dayroom. But after a while the white noise itself becomes an irritant. I know that spiritually-minded people and people of elevated consciousness would tell me that I can find the deepest forms of silence on the inside of my soul. If I quiet my thoughts. If I become a great blank void. I will have the ultimate silence.

That quietness, peace, and silence come from the very core of our being. That's so beautiful. But have you ever noticed that the little Buddhist monk guy is in a cave or in a monastery where no speaking (laughing, dancing, blaring music) is permitted. Have you ever noticed how these quiet moments are achieved in the forest or with twittering birds or by the ocean on a clear day? I would be much more impressed by a young mother surrounded by screaming infants, a barking dog and the hassles of everyday life telling me about the great inner silence than some holy person who doesn't engage in the mayhem and untidiness and extreme nosiness of life.

I do find moments of inner silence and quiet but usually unexpectedly. Fortunately for me I have a vivid imagination and can take my sunfish out into the middle of the Atlantic and just sit (but there is always a screaming sea gull or the soggy exhale of a whale) while my body is trapped in the mess hall. Those, however, are not my moments of peaceful solitude. My moments come when I forget myself. It's not that I blank out the world or my mind is a void or that there is an absence of noise; it is the absence of self. I don't mean I lose my identity and just merge into prison gray. I mean my focus shifts from the clamor of my self-absorption to a peaceful grateful mingling.

It's another one of those crazy paradoxes: gotta lose it to gain it; gotta mingle to find solitude. It's that peculiar lesson of being grateful for what you have before you can have more. When I don't strive for quiet and solitude it finds and cleanses me. Hopefully the dentist will too! (Elizabeth Haysom, Fluvanna Review, December 23, 2004)

Elizabeth Haysom is presently incarcerated at the Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women in Troy, Virginia. This column is one of a series, published under the general heading 'Glimpses from Inside.'