The Bravest Thing I've Ever Done

Getting sober is the bravest thing I’ve ever done. To look the world straight in the eye, without self-medicating first, requires this alcoholic to dig deep for the courage that many people seem to come by naturally. And she has to keep digging too, to keep up with the adventures of being human.

The artwork I’m using today is an illustration by Gustave Doré in the 1866 version of John Milton's Paradise Lost. “Satan rises from the burning lake” illustrates what Milton calls Lucifer’s “courage never to submit or yield.” The piece also has been used in reference to one of my all-time favorite poems, “Ulysses” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, which ends with these wonderful lines:

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

I memorized “Ulysses” for a college speech class, drawn to its celebration of the enduring adventuresome spirit. I never have read Paradise Lost, and I find the Satan connection a little icky. But the prompt for this week’s Poetry Jam asked poets to write something inspired by Paradise Lost, John Milton, or Gustave Doré, and my research led me to my beloved “Ulysses” via the aforementioned Lucifer link.

Courage is the thing that gets me excited. I’ve had to find some. I’ve had to learn how to endure when life goes sideways. I’ve had to learn self-discipline, the courageous act of refusing to yield to my own wild impulses, which would have me flee from uncomfortable circumstances. I’ve had to plumb my inner resources when shit hit the fan, and when I came up empty, I’ve had to discover that God’s grace is sufficient on any given day.

All of which is a boatload of verbiage to introduce a very short poem ~ 160 characters, to be exact, counting the spaces. Visit other poets monkeying around with ultra-shorts at Monkey Man’s place here, or jamming with Milton here.

Here is my extremely short epic poem:

Without a shield, I face my fears

Weak, unarmed, I will not yield

As the smoke of battle clears

I’m still standing on the field

By your cheers my wounds are healed!

Thank God My Car Was Smashed, Not Me

A tank destroyed my rear end this week. I’m grateful that it was my automobile’s and not my own posterior.

I didn’t see that at first. My initial reaction was a lot of effin’ this ’n’ thatness when the young lady in the souped-up Suburban plowed into us at full street speed, having failed to notice the cars ahead were stopped at a pedestrian crosswalk. Her apologies seemed inadequate to my shocked and whiplashed self as I confronted our seriously wounded beautiful car.

Afterward the 12-Step training kicked into gear and waged a rousing battle with resentment, armed with those formidable “Thank God” weapons. It’s not a walk in the park to be grateful in the face of crap, but it’s doable. Thank God for insurance on both automobiles, for no serious injuries, for credit cards and car rentals and trustworthy auto-body specialists owned by AA friends.

We’re off now to spend Thanksgiving amid the blessings of family, friends, and our old AA home group. A study of gratitude made the news today, finding that gratitude is good for the brain and the body’s well-being. Alcoholics Anonymous has preached that for 75 years. May you swim in thanksgiving, no matter what adversity you face.

"Every decision I make is a choice between a grievance and a miracle. I relinquish all regrets, grievances and resentments, and I chose the miracle."

(Deepak Chopra, “The Soul of Healing Meditation”)

Don’t Say What You’re Thinking

Anger was the topic of our Tuesday meeting, and I heard good stuff, from people whose thought processes I can understand. I share more commonality with the Vietnam-vet biker who says, “Rage is the wind that blows out the candle in my mind,” than I do with the average 50-something I meet on the street. One of the things I love about AA is the wonderful cross-section of purposeful, thoughtful, flawed, and honest humanity I’ve come to know because of meetings.

I got to share that last year I took on the F’d Be I, the Dept. of There-Is-No-Justice, the U.S. Secret-ary of Health and Inhuman Services, the Attorney Generality, and the health-care-not industry over the moral and civil-rights outrage perpetrated on my defenseless 79-year-old demented mother [is that bitterness I hear?], and nine months of misery later, this caped crusader for Truth, Justice, and Human Rights for Alzheimer’s Victims was a sad piece of a work, drowning in her outrage, and my mother was dead, free at last. I got very ill last winter, and by early spring it was clear that my outrage over injustice was harming only me, and I was going to have to change myself so I could live in an unjust world.

Resentment, says the book Alcoholics Anonymous, is poison to the person who nurtures it. How are we to make peace in a life where people and institutions do wrong and suffer no consequences? How are we to live serenely in a world where sh*t happens to innocent people? The fellowship of AA has devised many brilliant means of doing just that.

Mostly, they all boil down to what Gandhi said: “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” Start with giving grace, unearned forgiveness, to people who wrong you, as you have received grace from the loving God in your own imperfect life. Practice restraint of tongue and pen. Do not retaliate, argue, fume, or chew on arguments in your head. Instead, go do good work, own your own part in the shit, and be grateful for the ordinary miracles in your daily life. Work with a mentor. Wash your floors. Reach out a friendly hand to someone in need, and in general, learn to stay out of the bad neighborhood that is your own selfish head.

I am ceaselessly surprised that these things work. They work, in that they build a level of inner peace with the ebb and flow of life. Even if you choke on what you know is hypocrisy as you pray for the person who has offended you, doing it on your knees with your teeth gritted every day for two damn weeks, just because your sponsor suggested you try it, by God, it works! The one who changes is you, not the world, not your neighbor, just the one you live with day in and day out ~ that person becomes someone kinder, calmer, thankful, and a little more honest.

An aging ex-gangster at the meeting said his morning prayer is simple: “Hi, God, I’m awake, good luck.” Laughter is like tapping anger in the back of its knees: down it goes, toppling over like the great pretender that it is, mostly smoke and mirrors, self-justification and often fear masquerading as righteousness. Laughter heals a lot of wrongs, including our own. I’m grateful to be part of a community that laughs at itself and goes to sometimes great lengths to help others.

These days, I practice a lot of not saying the judgmental things I think about others. To a trusted few, I say whatever I think and laugh at it. My head, says one friend, is for entertainment purposes only. When the serious stuff that warrants deep thought crops up, I go to someone who has the kind of faith and wisdom I want, and I sound it out.

A line in a humble little book changed me this year. I found it in AA’s “12 Steps and 12 Traditions” under the discussion of the tenth step, in which we make a practice of honest self-examination and prompt admission of wrongs done. In a paragraph advocating a more merciful view of others, the writer says, “it is pointless to become angry or to get hurt by people who, like us, are suffering from the pains of growing up.” The italics are mine.

If I can recognize that my life is a series of adventures in growing up to be the person I want to become someday, if I am in the process of becoming and haven’t yet arrived there, how can I not grant you the grace of your own suffering?

You too are on a journey. I might enjoy thinking, in the private entertainment center of my mind, that you’re damned far behind me thanks to your stupid behavior ~ enjoy thinking that privately for, say, ten minutes max. Okay, twenty, AND I get to tell a trusted friend. Anything more than that is a resentment, otherwise known as beating myself with a hammer and hoping you are the one it hurts: a habit to avoid.

Catastrophic Thinking

I’m watching the neighbor’s two dogs run loose in the neighborhood. The tall golden one with tail lifted like a flag trots ahead, footloose and fancy-free, while the short-legged corgi-type scampers along like a caboose. They seem to be enjoying this lovely summer morning while we neighbors fret about them. One neighbor has corralled them once already and returned them to their back yard. She and my husband confer when the dogs free themselves again: What to do? No one is home at the dogs’ house and obviously the back yard cannot contain them.

People here care about their neighbors. My observant, friendly husband walks our dogs every morning and garners news or dispenses advice. I wonder if anyone has noticed we have a new housemate. Our 18-year-old granddaughter has moved into my daughter’s old bedroom to work and attend the local community college.

This has wrought a monumental change in our methodology. That bedroom was the bedroom of our two foundling kitties for the past two years. It was where we sequestered them to keep them safe from the dangerous outdoors when the doggie door was open for the beagles. I wanted indoor kitties when we adopted them because we once lost a cat to a predator, we think, and we once had a cat mauled. By this time, the young cats know their room, and they gallop into it with tails high at night, or whenever enticed by shaking a tin filled with cat food.

Since the advent of Lalas, as we call our granddaughter, the cats’ material goods have been moved into our room, and the cats are confused. They dash to the closed door of what used to be their habitat, and stare at it. At night, they wander our bedroom, wreaking havoc, opening cupboard doors, climbing the blinds, terrorizing the beagles, generally creating mayhem that keeps us awake and grouchy.

Twice last night in the dark I tripped over a frightened beagle who didn’t know which way to run: away from the cats, or away from the human feet. So she froze and was tripped over with great cusswords. By midnight, I was considering divorce. I’m a catastrophic thinker.

Thank God the weekend brought an AA convention to our area. At least for pockets of time I was not crazy. The Friday night speaker, Cliff R. from Southern California, gave me food for thought. He quoted Mother Teresa, and I wrote part of the quote on the back of my name tag:

“The fruit of prayer is faith, the fruit of faith is love, the fruit of love is service, the fruit of service is peace.” (Mother Teresa)

I suspended my plans for divorce this morning and made a date with a newcomer to meet her at an AA meeting today. I want some peace in my life, and the only peace I’ve ever found from my catastrophic thinking is in the oddly wrapped gift that is Alcoholics Anonymous.

Navel Gazing in the Extreme

I saw myself in a book one day when I was 36. Drugs and alcohol had driven me into the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous, and there, in what we call the Big Book, the text of AA, on page 62, I read this:

“Selfishness—self-centeredness! That, we think, is the root of our troubles. Driven by a hundred forms of fear, self-delusion, self-seeking, and self-pity, we step on the toes of our fellows and they retaliate.”

It was an aha moment for me. I recognized myself, my essential problem with life. My role as a victim ended that day. Not long ago, I read a comment on a blog and it sparked a poem about what my life could have become had I never set foot in AA.

How to Be Invisible

Her vaguely alarming
binocular soul-searching
was tedious to her friends
of whom there were few
and fewer still as the years
trudged onward
and her lenses fixed
ever more inward.
By the time she shuffled
off this mortal coil
she was minute, a mote
of dust on a microscopic
lens, and her soul
had vanished.

This is a Friday Flash 55. Go visit the G-Man for more tales in 55 words.

Fear Is the Mind-Killer

Fear used to rule my life, but not this week. I put on my journalist's hat today, driving way the hell-and-gone out into the country to interview an elderly man about his pioneering family. Not so long ago, I struggled with intense anxiety to do such a simple thing as calling to make the interview appointment. Days of agony attended a simple interview.

They make pills to manage anxiety like that, but I can't take them. If I do, my mind says I need 10 pills because dontcha know I have a high tolerance. I would rather battle anxiety than tempt such a monster.

In five years, I've gone from not being able to leave the house without my husband to cheerfully undertaking a half-hour drive through the country to find a man I do not know and help him feel comfortable telling me his family stories. It's been a bare-knuckled fight, accompanied by visits to my therapist and calls to my AA sponsor, not to mention prayer and gritted teeth. Mostly gritted teeth, if I'm honest.

I don't know how many times I have (mis)quoted Mr. Nietzsche in this private war against the debilitation of anxiety disorder, which is officially a member of my mental diagnoses. The accurate quote is "What does not destroy me, makes me stronger," but "That which doesn't kill me makes me stronger" is my mantra. Saying it didn't help me drive my car when anxiety ruled my world or make any number of forays outside my comfort zone for a long time. But saying it gave me, over time, the ability to look my fear in the face and say SOMETHING to it instead of "Yes, master."

Fear is the mind-killer, I remember reading in Dune years and years ago when that book came out. That line has helped me, too. I see fear for what it is: a slayer of all that is good in the human psyche. Funny, how violent is the verbiage of courage for me.

I learned a gentler, softer language in AA. "Fear is the wind that snuffs the candle in the mind" was one thing I grabbed onto. Another was: "Courage is not the absence of fear; it is taking action in spite of fear." And finally, it still comes down to this one for me: "The battle does not have to be won today, only the first skirmish." I've boiled it down to this: Just take the first indicated step; let the rest wait until tomorrow.

I've done many things in spite of anxiety, that four-syllabled sister of fear, of which I am enormously proud today. I've read my poems to crowds in auditoriums. I have gone to visit my mother, locked in the morass of Alzheimer's, and found her doing things that broke my heart but did not break me. I have spoken in city meetings. I have driven hundreds of miles by myself to attend conferences. I've talked myself down from panic attacks. Well, let me rephrase that. I have prayed myself through all those things. Even Nietzsche is a prayer.

Once, four years ago, I allowed myself, with my sponsor's go-ahead, to take anti-anxiety medication to fly across the country on vacation. All it did was make me a loaded anxious person. After that experience, I flew stone cold sober, preferring prayer to my own stupidity.

My struggles with anxiety are assets today when I talk with women who are dealing with fear. Without fear, there would be no need for faith. Fear can be a faith builder, just as fear can be a mind killer. Everything has a shadow. Fear's shadow is courage. Every time I take that first fearful step, I prove to myself I can be more than I am afraid I am.

I know there is a God because I know freedom today. A woman who couldn't leave her home five years ago is free today. Shaking a little inside, sometimes. But walking out, nevertheless.

That Jumping-Off Place

I’ve had three hours of sleep, and today I’m thinking about bliss. I even looked up the word to be sure I knew its correct definition: complete happiness or a state of spiritual joy, according to the dictionary that accompanies the Word program.

I’m thinking about “following your bliss,” a phrase coined by myth master Joseph Campbell as he discussed mythology and the hero’s journey with PBS journalist Bill Moyers in a series aired in the late 1980s. It means something like discovering you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be in this life, doing exactly the right thing for you to be doing, and finding fulfillment in it.

I’ve had about eight hours’ of sleep in three days; yesterday began for me at 6 a.m. and ended around 3 this morning. I was doing the work needed to compete in the final floral competition at our local fair. I signed up to do two separate, complete wedding flower displays. I don’t know what I was thinking. At 2:30 this morning, the work still wasn’t finished, but my body made me give up.

This morning I wrapped up the last bits at 7 a.m. and my husband helped me haul the pickup-load to the fair. I was content with the work I’d done and immensely grateful for many things. Friends let me harvest flowers from their gardens because my main bloom is still a few weeks off. The strength to work on my feet all day and all night was there. The inspiration was there, and the problems I encountered had simple solutions. Mostly, I was grateful to have found the desire to do a thing I love to do and follow it through all the friggin’ way, even when the work was hard.

Someone asked me at the flower building this morning if I would give her some tips on floral design. All of a sudden, the years fell away and I was 16 years old, living in a small desert town. My brief stint at McDonald’s hamburger joint had come to an ignominious end. My spirits couldn’t keep up with the busloads of tourists on their way to Las Vegas wanting burgers their way right now. I promptly went across the street to the town’s flower shop and offered to work for free if they would teach me how to arrange flowers. The owner looked at my little application, lifting her glasses off her face, and then she put them back on and looked at me. “Come back Monday morning,” she said. “We’ll pay you minimum wage to start.”

That was my first "jumping-off place." For the next five years I worked for her after school and during summers while in college, learning how to arrange flowers for every occasion. I went to college in the first place to study floral design and horticulture, which I promptly abandoned after the first semester to become an English Lit. major. English Lit. gave me a wonderful career in magazines, but I worked in flower shops off and on over the years between jobs. What’s not to love about working with flowers?

I’ve been blessed over and over throughout this summer’s floral competition by the awareness that I’m exactly where I should be, at this stage in my life. I’ve received bountiful gifts from my Higher Power, in the form of joy, ideas, flowers, weather, prizes, love, and memories. It’s been a spiritual experience, leading me to the discovery that joy has returned. Another "jumping-off place" has happened.

This is what Joseph Campbell says about bliss: “I came to this idea of bliss because in Sanskrit, which is the great spiritual language of the world, there are three terms that represent the brink, the jumping-off place to the ocean of transcendence: Sat-Chit-Ananda. The word ‘Sat’ means being. ‘Chit’ means consciousness. "Ananda’ means bliss or rapture. I thought, ‘I don't know whether my consciousness is proper consciousness or not; I don't know whether what I know of my being is my proper being or not; but I do know where my rapture is. So let me hang on to rapture, and that will bring me both my consciousness and my being.’ I think it worked.

“If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are — if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.”

The judges liked my wedding work, pictured here. Now I’m going to enjoy the refreshment of a nap and say another prayer of thanks.

***
Several hours later….

Couldn’t sleep, so I got up and cruised around on low speed, cleaning up here and there after the explosion of floral detritus over the past 10 days. My house looks like a tired flower shop on Mother’s Day: stems, leaves, vases and buckets of aging greenery and unused flowers everywhere. I even swiped the vase that normally sits on the corner of my desk with something in it all seasons, and the blank hole there bugs me. So I arranged yet another vase of flowers, which I later took to an AA meeting tonight and gave to my sponsor in thanks for letting me have trimmings from her redwood, eucalyptus, Japanese maple and pine trees for my greenery. Can’t bring myself to put another vase together tonight. A nice chore to look forward to in the morning.

The AA meeting got me thinking about the tie between a couple of my life’s jumping-off places and being sober. “We stood at the turning point,” the Alcoholics Anonymous text says of that moment when a person is suddenly driven to ask for help with her drinking problem. There’s a willingness at that moment to surrender to anything that promises an iota of relief from the misery of drinking oneself to death.

I drank to change how I felt, to feel more of something, to feel less of something. I did that from the time I had my first drink. When alcohol hit my bloodstream, something inside said, “Oh, yes!” It never stopped saying yes with an exclamation point. I couldn’t picture my life without it. But some mysterious awareness had bloomed in my brain, which told me that alcohol might be the source of my misery instead of being the solution for it. I discovered I wanted to live, and I found myself seeking out Alcoholics Anonymous and teetering on the brink. I can’t live with booze, and I can’t live without it, I metaphorically said. The people in the AA meetings said, “We know how you feel and we have a solution that allows us to live sober, happy lives.”

I took that leap of hope. Today I can do all the things I thought I’d never be able to do without at least a little buzz. AA saved my life and gave me a life, as I’ve heard said in meetings, a gift I didn’t foresee when I stood at that jumping-off place in the doorway of an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in May 1990.

And I’ve found that it’s true what I heard said in those early meetings: You walk in the door with a little list of hopes—just to stop drinking yourself into misery, stop being so very ill from alcohol poisoning, stop losing parts of your life like your job, your spouse, your self-respect. You think that’s all you want. But you’d shortchange yourself if you settled just for that little list, because sobriety brings with it an enormous list of miracles. People are reborn.

But Can They Fly?

This winged wonder is the kite I've made to enter in the Mid-State Fair coming to my area this week. It's a triangular box kite variation on a conyne design, using vinyl shelf liner and photos by Ansel Adams from last year's calendar. Will it fly? Hell if I know. The fair's handmade kite competition doesn't require a flight.

The fair always comes up with some theme each year, and in the floral design competitions we'll have to find ways to illustrate the theme in flower arrangements. This year's doozy is "Mountains of Fun" and I nearly scratched from the kite business because of it. Easily overwhelmed, poor me.

But I'm a member in good standing of Alcoholics Anonymous, and the program does NOT advocate giving up when the going gets tough. I did what a good AA ought to do when she has signed up to make a kite and now thinks it will be too hard: call on her sponsor. Sponsors handle all kinds of odd problems.

I was reminded of that ever-so-helpful Chinese proverb: The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. What's the first indicated thing to do? Prayer is usually a smart idea.

Now, God is probably very busy with serious issues. But in AA I'm allowed to access a Higher Power of my own understanding. While the God of my fathers is far too tied up with enormous global and individual crises to care about kite anxiety, my own Higher Power has wiggle room to handle challenges of every sort. So I dialed my spiritual hotline. Next thing I know, that old Ansel Adams calendar comes to mind, with its beatiful black and white photos of mountains. Ha! It happened on the 101 freeway heading for an AA meeting. If anyone tries to argue me out of believing in my Higher Power, I will show them this kite. And I know it will fly even though it doesn't have to.

And here's a photo just for fun of my newest garden acquisition. The 30-inch curving top piece, headed with an iron butterfly on one end and an iron weight on the other, is simply balanced on the stand of stones on a quarter-inch ball welded to the top piece. The large butterfly and a smaller one partway down the backside catch the breeze, and the whole things turns gently on the stand. I wonder what would happen to the betterflies in a gale. Would they fly?

Inner Weather

Around here in June, they say if you don’t like the weather, just wait five minutes. I thought about that today, not because of the outdoor weather, although it’s been reliably irregular, but because of what it’s like to be a human being.

My inner weather is whimsical, affected by the least little breeze stirred up by outside circumstances. One of the things that attracts me about Alcoholics Anonymous is its promise that I can lead a life of serenity in spite of what happens around me and to me, if I stay focused on gratitude and helping others.

Live in an attitude of gratitude, they told me as a newcomer. You don’t just have a drinking problem; you have a THINKING problem. Your head is not your friend even though it’s attached to your neck. Address the problem of the mind, and you’ll straighten out, physically and mentally.

All of that, I’ve found in my experience to be true. But it does take work. Ten minutes after an uplifting AA meeting, I can be a sad sack all over again because a foul breeze blew in from outside. Someone looks at me wrong, my shoelace breaks, I have to do something that I don’t enjoy.

This week a woman said she fell into a bad place in her head and it made her start isolating at home, where nothing got any better, surprise, surprise. A man said he got a bill that was higher than he expected, and he was bummed out about it big time.

It takes so little to make our emotional weather go south on us. I have a lot of aches and pains this week, I’m fatigued by a new medication, gosh, life is hard. Next thing I know, I’m oblivious to all the grace in my life.

I’m working with a new sponsor, who has assigned me the task of maintaining a written gratitude list that I add to daily. I’m not batting 1000 in that area. But it has made me conscious of my inner weather. Today, I’m grateful for food in my refrigerator, for the way cats’ eyes change in the light, for living in a home that has flowers blooming in the yard. A foul breeze may in the next instant blow that gratitude all to hell, but hey, I can start all over again!

Each day brings its own bucket of challenges. I’m grateful for the 12-Step program tools that keep us going when life happens. I couldn’t do life alone. Without my AA fellowship, I’d be stuck in my head like a shoe in a dryer. I haven’t had a shoe in the dryer in a long time. Thanks, God.

The photos in this post are snapshots of northern California taken on my trip to visit my niece. Thank you, God, for landscapes.

Which Wolf Will I Feed?

Today marks the longest darkness of the year. With the Winter Solstice, winter begins in all its bite and gloom and sense of death, where I live, its barren trees and frost-burnt landscape, shades of charcoal and brown as far as I can see.

This morning, as I look out on naked trees and gray sky during a break in a week-long rain, I feel the weight of the Winter Solstice on my shoulders. What it deprives me of is important to me: sunshine, warmth, the ability to walk sleeveless and barefoot in my garden, the joy of living in a fertile landscape. It will rain on Christmas, says the forecast, and the unrelenting rain has begun to cause problems around my county.

But then, with my second cup of coffee, I remember an epiphany I once had during an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting:

My attitude makes the difference between peace and unhappiness.

There's a Native American legend about two wolves. A grandfather tells his grandson that two wolves fight within him, one full of evil emotions, and one full of good. "Which wolf will win?" asks the grandson. The grandfather replies, "The one you feed."

The same message can be said many different ways, but the point is the same. First, my thoughts govern how I feel, and second, I have the power to change my mind - to feed a different wolf! The process, in the example of winter, looks like this:

The Winter Solstice is the longest darkness of the year. Yes, but from this point on, the hours of daylight will lengthen every day! The winter landscape looks dead, yes, but the life force is simply resting, as all living things must do. Sleep gives me strength to exert the energy of living. And the rain? Rain is the Great Nourishment of the earth. It hydrates the cells of our land, feeds our oceans, helps fuel our climates, awakens the sleeping seeds in the earth. Rain is the Lifespring.

All is well. Earth's cycles of rest and replenishment are in motion as they needs must be. God, or Gaia, however you name that power or life source, continues to provide for the needs of the planet, and the creatures living on it, like you and me.

Rain

After a three-year drought that turned to dust the riverbed,
today the manna from heaven falls on the surface of the soil,

Which laps it neatly as a cat. The pores of leaves open
like mouths to drink it. The shrubbery shivers with raindrops,

The pine needles quiver, the brave narcissus bow their heads.
Rain toots on the roof like a piccolo. A sigh of satisfaction

Escapes the mouth of the ground. Roots hum as their veins swell,
and brown water begins to pool in the riverbed. Small puddles

Rise in the low spots. Slowly they reach for their neighbors,
a trickle builds, they link, and the river’s muddy blood awakens


++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++



Speaking of rain, here's a vintage rain song on youTube by the folksinger Melanie, who performed it at Woodstock (where it rained). If you're like me and you can't catch all the words, lyrics are right beneath.

Got Any Money in the Bank?

“Yesterday is history, tomorrow a mystery, and today is money in the bank.”
Red W., AA oldtimer

I sobered up in a dingy AA clubhouse in the Los Angeles area 20 years ago. I showed up in my designer high heels, with my $100 haircut and boutique clothes, straight from work in my publishing house, right before the 6 p.m. meetings started so I wouldn’t have to talk to anyone. I found a seat at the acres of long folding tables, metal chairs, and metal ashtrays and waited, staring into the middle distance with an eff-off lift of my chin.

I sort of liked the grimy place. It was a broad open space with a podium and a battered metal desk on a small stage at the head of the room. Hung on the “off-white” walls were signs in inexpert calligraphy announcing profundities like “First Things First” and “Easy Does It.” It was far better than the first hole-in-wall AA meeting place I had stumbled into, which had been the size of a bathtub stuffed full of bikers and gray-skinned heroin addicts who scared me.

I made $65,000 a year editing a fitness magazine for a world-famous bodybuilding firm. From a small-town girl, I had made myself a denizen of LA’s sophisticated side. I was 36 years old. On Saturdays, for fun, I spun around the LA freeways in my new little car with a bottle of Stoly’s and the windows down. Now I drank vodka in the morning before work, and I drank all day long, all night, weekends, everywhere, all the time, and I was ready to try AA.

In those meetings at that clubhouse, someone would get up, sit at the desk at the head of the room, and talk about alcoholism for a while, telling his story. A long-haired musician from Detroit. An aging make-up artist from the film industry. Some guy from PG&E. Then he’d pick people to go up to the podium to say a few words. The things people said were honest and searching and I could relate. I drank coffee and listened. Came back four evenings a week and on Saturday mornings at 9.

One evening the Mo-town musician looked down the tables and pointed his finger at me. I went to the podium and looked at all those people. I didn’t know shit from Shinola and words stuck in my throat. So I dropped the defenses and just told them the truth. I’m new. I drink all the time. I need help.

After the meeting a bossy, expensive little woman told me to come with her. She led me across the room to a corner table, to a white-haired elderly lady in heavy make-up surrounded by other women. “This is Helen,” she said. “You need a sponsor.” Helen told me that from now on I was to sit at her table with her “gals.”

Everything changed.

Eight years later I stood next to her bed while she died of pneumonia. Twenty years later I stood next to my mother while she died of pneumonia. I’ve been able to part of the human race. I’m not afraid of life or the dying that goes with it.

Every morning I get this day right here. Today is money in the bank. I don’t have to solve all the problems in the world. I get to do my best with what faces me now, be kind to the people who come across my path, and try to remember to say thanks somewhere along the day, the more often, the better.

Addiction's Different Faces

What I hope my Lady Banks rose will look like next spring.

“When you discover your mission, you will feel its demand. It will fill you with enthusiasm and a burning desire to get to work on it.”

W. Clement Stone

I’ve spent the better part of the past two days in bed and now sport wrist braces on both arms because I discovered my mission and it filled me with a burning desire to get to work on it. My to-do list is down to two items and both hands are messed up. My right hand and forearm are swollen. Both hands buzz with some kind of nerve pain, and the right hand is agonizing at night. I’ve also contracted a cold.

But my Cecile Brunner rose is now an architectural beauty, and the Lady Banks rose hedges are lean, clean, and rewoven. I have conquered and pruned the tumultuous herb shrubs into tidy mounds. Parts of the house are sparkling clean.

I don’t know how to work in moderation. I have two speeds: slow and 100 mph. Some of my sober friends blame their excessive behaviors on their alcoholism. I don't know about that. I just know that today I’m thankful I can work at all. In the past two days, we’ve lost two friends to the ravages of addiction.

On Monday, a youngish woman showed up at an AA meeting after an absence of a few months, tearful and thankful to be welcomed back warmly. She had made a decision that she wanted to live, she said. She was going to start calling me, and a sober newcomer became her designated driver so she could attend a meeting Monday night and another one on Tuesday at noon. On Tuesday at noon, she was found dead.

Wednesday evening, the wife of one of my husband’s good friends called to say he had died that morning. In the past six months, his heroin addiction had robbed him of the ability to walk, to eat, and to care for himself, but he spurned the offers of his sober friends to help him. All I could think of after Janet’s call was that day, years ago, when I called him for help because my husband was in a deep depression, and he came right away to our house.

My other friend, who spiraled out of control earlier this month on an opiate addiction, has decided for now that she doesn’t deserve to ask her friends for help in her struggle to stay clean. She wants to be left alone. So we don’t see much of her. Until she reaches out for help, there’s nothing any of us can do.

More than 20 years ago, before I got sober, an unsolicited manuscript came across my desk as editor of a fitness magazine. One of the associate editors had thought it worth consideration for publication. The title of the manuscript put me off because it didn’t provide a clue what the article was about. It was called “Cunning, Baffling, Powerful.” After a glance at the manuscript, I understood it addressed alcoholism. I didn’t like it, so I passed it back to the associate editor with a rejection note.

But today I know what “cunning, baffling, powerful” means. Substance addiction is a hard enemy to fight. It can strike when you’re weak and when you’re strong. It can go into remission and return with a deadly vengeance. It can conquer a person’s willpower for life. It makes you deny you have a fatal disease. It’s insatiable. It’s never cured. We live recovery one day at a time because that’s all we’ve got, this moment of freedom from addiction.

I’m thankful for freedom today. With my wrist braces on, I put my hands together and pray.

A Day of Hope

“The day the Lord created hope was probably the same day he created Spring.”

Bern Williams

“If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant; if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome.”

Anne Bradstreet

“All through the long winter, I dream of my garden. On the first day of spring, I dig my fingers deep into the soft earth. I can feel its energy, and my spirits soar.”

Helen Hayes

When I decided to write something in honor of the vernal equinox, the first day of Spring, I couldn’t choose which of these three quotes to use. They all speak to me. So you’re getting all three.
Spring does represent hope to me. The long winter is officially over. The sun will linger longer in the sky. The plants will bathe in it.
I finished the colossal work of weeding at 6 p.m. on the first day of Spring. Everything is clean and ready for the season of growth. I found new buds hidden in the weeds. I uncovered hyacinths. The buds on the cherry trees have exploded into flowers.
Hope explodes.

An alcoholic woman I sponsor is in intensive care today with bleeding in the brain following a head injury. She’s unable to tell us what happened. She’s unable to communicate because it looks like her language center is severely impaired.
What we know is that no one heard from her for over two days, and a bag of groceries sat on the table with the lettuce turning to mush. We know she was incoherent from a head injury when she was found Friday by the police after a concerned friend called them. She was malnourished and severely dehydrated.
We know that four large, empty bottles of mouthwash were found in her trashcan outside the house. We know that she has struggled to stay sober ever since giving up some years of sobriety on a drunken spree last year.
And I know that this time she was very excited by a newfound sense of surrender and she was happy to have three months sober.

For someone who suffers from alcoholism, alcohol is cunning. The disease is almost a living beast with powerful claws and teeth that sink deep into a person who is unarmed against it. To keep it at bay, recovering alcoholics have to maintain a daily close spiritual contact with a Power greater than alcohol. Recovery takes a lot of courage and vigilance. It isn’t for sissies.
The reason I’m relating this story on a day of hope is this: For anyone who is an addict/alcoholic, or who loves an addict/alcoholic, the disease only seems to be hopeless. There is a Power greater than the disease. Millions of people have tapped that unsuspected inner resource and have been released from bondage. I’m powerless to save someone who suffers from addiction, but there is Someone who can, and who will, if He is sought.

Today hope springs eternal.

A Sunrise in the Soul

My writing room faces east. I’ve seen a lot of sunrises this winter, because suddenly I’ve become an early riser.
I wake up in the predawn darkness, make a cup of Italian or French roast, and come into my all-glass room. My shades are drawn for privacy, so I turn on the light and open my blog.

When the sky overhead lightens to a purple-blue, I turn off the light and raise the blinds. My desk overlooks the northeast and a huge oak that’s 500 years old or more. I watch the oak become visible in the twilight of dawn. I watch the sky over the eastern hill change color.
I’ve seen fluorescent red dawns, purple and pink dawns, yellow dawns, dark gray dawns.
Several times I’ve tried to describe in a poem the transformation I see. I keep trying, because there’s something deeply spiritual about the inexorable journey toward dawn. The breakthrough moment of sunrise, when that ball of fire lifts its face over the horizon, always feels like a victory.

When I was a practicing alcoholic addict, I saw a few sunrises when I had stayed up all night partying, as we called it. I can remember the sense of exhaustion and chemical tweaking that went with it.
Usually the nights ended with me collapsing on the bed, hoping to be dead to the world for a few hours, at least until the world stopped spinning. At the end of my drugged career, I was often sick with the poisons I had pumped into my body.
Dawn meant misery.
Last night I got some material ready for a woman who wants to begin work on her 4th Step. She’s like me, someone who was clean and sober for years and then relapsed when she stopped practicing the 12 Steps in her daily life.

In an inventory, we uncover the causes and conditions that led us to drink and use. That step allows us to begin work on the resentments and fears that drive us to do what we do.
I thought my childhood caused me to self-medicate. I thought maybe I was mentally ill and doomed. Whatever, it was not my fault, and I was hopeless.
That wonderful 4th Step inventory showed me that my problems originate in my mind, in my way of viewing and interpreting experiences. If they originate with me, then I can do something about them.

The 12 Steps give me a sunrise in my soul. With each step I take, the dawn grows brighter, transforming my world. Each morning, I am new again.
Dawn brings hope. As long as I practice recovery in my life, my hope is renewed daily. It’s a spiritual hope that just for today I will dwell in the sunlight of the Spirit. And the Spirit never disappoints.

*****

Have You Thrown Your Heart Lately?

Flash 55

This is a Friday Flash 55 in honor of a loved one's birthday today. Gone but not forgotten. If you want to tell a story in exactly 55 words, post it and go tell the G-Man.


Grief Stricken


Her eyes
looking at you
were tender
The light
in her smile
lit fires in you
Her hair
shone golden
in the sunshine
The lightness
of her touch
moved your soul
Her presence
sparkled
with life
The lightness
transfixed
you always
Her light
has died
now forever
How will you
ever breathe
again?

“Throw your heart over the fence and the rest will follow.”

Norman Vincent Peale

One night when I was 18 years old and tired of living in a small desert town, tired of hanging out with my druggie friends, I lay in my dark bedroom wondering what in the hell could I do?

What happened next, I can only describe as a vision that bloomed in my mind like a flower: I could go to college!

No one in my extended family had ever gone to college. At this idea of me in college, my heart smiled.

The next day I started writing letters, asking for information. I talked to my parents. They talked to each other. They hit me with an offer. If I earned half the cost, they would pay the other half.

I threw my heart over that fence. It took me almost a year to save the money from my florist-shop job. I decided on a university and got accepted.

All the rest followed. I studied my love, English. Graduated summa cum laude. Went to L.A. and enjoyed a 20-year career in magazine editing and writing. Made a rewarding life for myself…all because I put myself whole-heartedly behind a vision.

In the same way, I threw myself into Alcoholics Anonymous 20 years ago. I’ve stumbled, got up, and thrown my heart into it again. The vision of life as a sober person gets 100 percent of my commitment.

I’ve done the same thing with my marriage to Joe. For 18 years we’ve both put our hearts into this thing. We’ve learned forgiveness, acceptance, laughter, anger without mean words, and compromise.

When I read Norman Peale’s quote, those are the things I think about and feel grateful for. I think when we throw our hearts over the fence of a good cause, the rest follows. There’s a qualifier here: The cause has to be for our good, not for selfish, screwed-up motives. I’ve tried that way, and it led to unhappiness. But when the fence is good, when our commitment is full of our best efforts, when God smiles on us…the rest follows.

For what have you thrown your heart over the fence?

*****

Thank God for Trouble

“We are continually faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.”

John Gardner

This is me (sometimes) when faced with trouble: A tennis shoe tumbling in a dryer.
I ruminate repeatedly on the problem. Because I can’t think of a solution, I just think about the problem, until my head feels like a dryer with a tennis shoe in it.

Some troubles are fun because it’s a challenge to find an answer. Some, I’m powerless to fix and so I have to practice acceptance. Some are just plain painful.

Take my mother, for example. She has dementia, which has metamorphosed into Alzheimer’s in the past four months. It causes some problems that are interesting, such as how to explain the process of putting on a pair of pants, when she is totally befuddled by the procedure? It causes other problems that I’m helpless to change, such as the loss of her memory. Rather than fight against it with constant reminders that hurt her dignity, I have to accept that’s how things are now.

And the dementia causes plain old pain, because I’ve lost my mother and I feel grief about that. Every day, I have to be the parent to my own mom, and I hate it. I don’t like the “opportunities” that presents.

Much of the time, I make my own misery by refusing to accept insoluble problems, by trying to exert my own willpower over them and manhandle my way into fixing them to my satisfaction. The book Alcoholics Anonymous says, on page 133, “Avoid, then, the deliberate manufacture of misery, but if trouble comes, cheerfully capitalize it as an opportunity to demonstrate [God’s] omnipotence.”

I guess I’m not highly evolved or spiritual enough, because that word “cheerfully” seems impossible to me. But trouble does drive me to my knees these days, and that’s a good place to be.

There are many problems beyond my human ability to mend. There are problems I could mend if only I knew how. Both of these situations are opportunities to watch my Creator at work, if I put my troubles into His big hands.

I’m thankful that in recovery I’ve learned the power of getting out of the problem and into the solution. I don’t have to let the shoe in the dryer keep on tumbling into infinity. Today, troubles are, for the most part, opportunities to grow along spiritual lines, to let go and let God. But to tell the truth, sometimes there are scratch marks where my fingers held on until the last possible moment!

What do you do with your problems? How do you turn them into opportunities?

(The photos are of my Katie Cat, who kept pulling out her stitches. The solution to her problem was a cone. After five days, she no longer fights it and is practicing acceptance.)

*********

You Are Who You Are

Me in a marble

“The easiest thing in the world to be is you. The most difficult thing to be is what other people want you to be. Don't let them put you in that position.”

Leo Buscaglia

I don’t know what a co-dependent is exactly, but I have a feeling that’s because I wasn’t one. I just didn’t like myself.
Having a relationship with my Creator changed all that in a miraculous way.

When I was young, I was bad. That was my role in the family, and that was how I stood vis-à-vis the God I was raised with. Can anybody relate?

Then I had a deep spiritual experience and was reborn. But I still fell terribly short of the requirements my faith dictated. Now God loved me, but I was supposed to live a very spiritual life, and I didn’t do that, so again, I was bad. This went on for decades.

Then I found the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous. I did the 12 Steps with a sponsor and discovered forgiveness. I discovered my God not only forgave but loved me exactly as I am, imperfect and also very wonderful.

Part of my imperfection is that I really need the affirmation of others to believe that I am okay as I am. I can accept it today, since most other people feel the same way. Acceptance of my humanity makes it possible for me to be me and to let you be you.

Today my intuition is better than it once was, thanks to the Steps. I can feel when I’m not being authentic, when I’m searching more for affirmation than I should. I’ve also been blessed because the people I’m close to also accept me as I am, and they don’t require me to be other than that.

Do you believe you’re good just as you are? Are you glad you are who you are?

~~~~~~~

My Head Is Not My Friend

The garden was horrible. The whole area wrapping around the back of the house was a big ugly mess. Just the sight of it was overwhelming.

The head said, “Run back in the house!”
The program of recovery said, “Just because your head is attached to your body doesn’t make it your friend.”

This is what I saw when I stood out there wanting to flee this problem.
Dead stuff as tall as my head.

Weeds up to my knees.

To top it off, a gopher had found my garden and had begun to kill my prize hollyhocks.

I feared the problem was larger than I am. FEAR= F Everything And Run. Or Face Everything And Recover.
The Alcoholic Anonymous Big Book says the main problem for the alcoholic centers in the mind (page 23). A vital spiritual experience changes things, and “Ideas, emotions, and attitudes which were once the guiding forces of these men are suddenly cast to one side, and a completely new set of conceptions and motives begin to dominate them” (page 27).
I know I’ve had spiritual awakening as the result of taking the 12 Steps.

So I had a spiritual experience in the big ugly garden. I stood there with gardening gloves and pruning shears, wanting to run but didn’t.
In Appendix II of the Big Book, William James is quoted as saying there’s an “educational variety” of spiritual experience that develops slowly over time. But still it results in a “profound alteration in [my] reaction to life” that wasn’t brought about by myself alone.

My life has been like a garden run amok, and I wound up in a big ugly mess that landed in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous. Slowly, one small section at a time, the Master Gardener worked on me.
I had a profound alteration in my reaction to life in that garden. It became important to just make a beginning, take the first step, worry about the next one later. Once I was committed, I started seeing things differently.

I saw this.

And I saw this.

And the work gradually got done. Not all of it. Not even most of it. But a beginning was made, and I’m free of the bondage of despair. Maybe I’ll even get that gopher.

Update, Sunday afternoon: Gopher, 1 --- Chris, 0

Friday Flash 55

Crawling Out of Fire


The way across the desert is not by holding hands with you.
I am my own salvation. Through fire, thirst, and wretchedness,
still my feet will carry me, my hands
will claw across that no-man’s-land
to a country where upon the moss and fallen trees
the cool mist of morning rests.

If you would like to tell a tale or a poem in exactly 55 words, post it and go tell the G-Man.

The back story of this poem is that even in the cups of my alcoholism, I knew it would take my own effort to crawl out of the fire my life had become. No man was going to help me. Every relationship I had entered had ended the same way; no matter how exhilarating the beginning, it eventually wound down due to my craziness and self-medication.

I had the sense to see even in my cups that it was going to take personal work, not a love relationship, to save myself. It would be another five years after this poem was written before I found my way into Alcoholics Anonymous, and discovered a way out of the desert.

Somewhere within me burned a spark of the divine hope that perhaps there was a solution to the mess of my life, and perhaps I had enough inner resources left to stumble into the rooms of recovery. I haven't had to crawl through a desert since.

It's appropriate for New Year's Day to reflect on the thirst, the fire, and the wretchedness that plagued me in all my addicted years. Drugs and alcohol had been part of my life from the time I was 13. I was 36 when I found Alcoholics Anonymous, thanks to a few people who told me the truth about my behavior.

I've been in the fellowship of AA for almost 20 years. When I followed the program and did what was the original key to recovery, I stayed sober for a very long time. Then I drifted away and got well, and within a year or two was drunk again.

I have struggled since 2006 to get real time again. It has been a wonderful journey back into recovery, with a new perspective and new devotion to the spiritual way of life. My experiences are a great help to a number of women who struggle in AA. Everything I have gone through will be someday a blessing to someone else.

I've never been so content in my whole life. I hope my blog encourages others who are casting about for hope, that they might also leave behind the desert of their old life. We do this with the help of one another and of a tireless, relentless Higher Power, who never gives up on His kids.

God bless the coming new year for all of us who struggle and overcome, who find the great joy in the road to happy destiny.

Photo credit: sand dunes at Dubai, courtesy staff at East Tenn State University

Will Work for Dirt

The homeless man down on the corner
carries a sign that says I’m on the road
and hungry—will work for food
and while he can say love
in 14 different languages
passersby carefully don’t meet his eye
except my mother when we stop
at the light She says here’s a dollar
it’s all I have and when we drive away
she says My father gave up his violin
for some land and a mule to plow it
with and then I understand
we all of us dream for earth
that we can call our own
except that homeless man
and he is excellent at saying
goodbye

I've worked on an article about gratitude this month for a local magazine, and I thought the photo of the "hens and chickens" was apt since they freely multiply, just like a gift given in the spirit of love.

"The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings." That was said by philosopher and Presidential Medal of Freedom winner Eric Hoffer.

The sun is rising over the horizon and shining in my eyes. Some of my blessings today are that I'm sober and thankful for this room I call my own, for my fat beagles and two kittens, and some earth to call my own, even if the bank owns it really, it is mine to plant and plow.

I'm excited that a friend of mine who drank again wants me to sponsor her, because I hear surrender in her voice.

Yesterday's Twenty-Four Hour a Day book had a meditation that touched me:

"In our time of meditation, we again seem to hear: 'Come unto me, all ye that are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.' Again and again we seem to hear God saying this to us. 'Come unto Me' for the solution of every problem, for the overcoming of every temptation, for the calming of every fear, for all our need, physical, mental, or spiritual, but mostly 'come unto Me' for the strength we need to live with peace of mind and the power to be useful and effective."

Chris Alba © 2009