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Many of our courthouses sport an icon of Lady Justice armed with a sword, which can seem to suggest retribution. Our icon’s scales pit two sides against each other, conjuring corrosive argument and win-or-lose thinking. She is blindfolded rather than seeing truth or expressing compassion. She cuts down and casts out the guilty, ignoring that they, too, are our children. What effect might it have on our justice system if we change our cultural image, our icon, of Lady Justice?

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Pando, which is Latin for “I spread,”  is the name of an aspen grove in Utah that contains approximately 47,000 tree trunks from a single root system. It’s considered by scientists to be the largest single living organism. How would we change our formal justice system if we looked at ourselves as similarly, intrinsically bound together?

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This Mandala is built around the circular Scale of Justice shown in the Lady Justice piece. The circular scale signals consideration of the needs of all stakeholders as a necessary step of restoring justice. Woven in the nest of branches among among scales is the following meditation poem, written by the artist.

Take a Breath

Take a breath
with each of the children sleeping upstairs.
Take one with each of the neighbors
who are getting ready for work.
She is brushing her teeth.
He is fixing coffee.

Somewhere on this street, someone is coughing.
Take a breath with him.
Somewhere on this block, an exhausted mother
is sitting with her energetic infant, wishing for sleep.
Take a breath with her, and take another
with her grinning, gurgling child.

Somewhere in this city, a man is lifting weights.
Breathe out with him as he pushes out the bar.
A woman is in labor. Breathe with her.
A frail man is fighting an impossible illness
and is close to losing.
Take a small breath.
Take a small breath.
Take a small breath, with each of them
Who are barely breathing.
And with each of them who are sleeping.
And with each of them in their cars,
thinking of the things they think
to begin their day.

In the next city is a husband at work.
He’s on the phone. Breathe with him.
Somewhere, at this very moment,
a baby’s lungs fill with air for the very first time.
Take a breath. Look, here is another!
And breathe with the mother,
and breathe with the father,
looking into the new child’s eyes
and wondering who is there.
Somewhere, at this very moment,
Someone is curled up in fear, dreading
the coming day, the next moment.
This one, too, barely breathes.
Someone is praying.
No matter that she is not your religion.
Take a breath with her.
Someone is eating.
No matter that you do not like that food.
Take a breath and savor its aroma.

Now for the hard part.
Someone is being raped and
Someone is doing the raping.
Take a breath with each of them.
They were both the new child, too.
Someone is nervously drinking a cola for breakfast
Breathing out through cold fizz,
carefully ignoring the .38 in his sock
and his plans for later today.
Someone is breathing in tobacco, someone cocaine.
Go ahead, breathe with them.
Don’t pretend that you know nothing
of the gaping hole that this one and that one
don’t know how to fill.
Someone behind bars is almost conscious of your breath
because of how it tastes of a different life.

This one chokes on anger and grief, and tries
to refuse to breathe.
This one exhales a litany of rage.
Join it anyway. Now this breath,
it smells of socks, and this of mold,
this of rotting food, of stale urine, and this of shit.
This smells of hunger, this of bitterness, and this of hate.
If only you could breathe into them with springtime,
earth, cut grass, or molasses cookies.
And here is a grandmother breathing springtime,
earth, cut grass, and molasses cookies.
Sometimes this child walking slowly to school can smell them.
Sometimes the pedophile and the pimp can smell them.
On occasion, the child locked in the hotel room of
onion sweat and cigarette butts can remember them.
Breathe with them.

There is a diver climbing back onto the beach
tasting of salt and fish. His body is tuned
to the roar and whisper of waves.

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Define “Art,” or “Beauty.” Although the words are used commonly, everyone sees them through their own personal lens. The nature of language to be indeterminate is both a blessing and a curse. It makes poetry beautiful, but renders legal code difficult to write and understand. Despite tremendous effort given to pinning down meaning through complicated legal language, the ambiguous nature of words still leaves the window open to successfully argue positions that are outside the law’s intent.

The length and complexity of our laws and contracts attempt to thwart the effects of indeterminate language. Does this solution help citizens to live by and benefit from the intentions of these laws or contracts?

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This work was created for the Cross Currents portfolio, a project of printmaker Sherry Smith Bell’s studio Blue Sky Press. The portfolio, along with this work, was accepted into the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Achenbach Collection at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Bancroft Library Special Collections at UC Berkeley, and the Turner Print Museum.