Daily Reprieve

I have lived another day.  I went to a treatment facility last night.  There is something powerful about going there;  to look on the faces of fear or the masks of bravado empowered by denial.  In the speed of thought, I fly back to my own seat in this place.  I trust no one.  Including myself.  The only god I am willing to believe in is one I must forge out of life and death necessity.  I do not worship this deity, I tolerate it.  But I am wary, not wanting to find myself wasting a good portion of life once more on a social control scam.  I lash out and fight in the dark, hoping to hit something.  grab hold of something.  I am looking for truth with clarity.  I am looking for genuine expression.  Give me your experience so that I can draw my own conclusions.  What is really going on here?

Little by little, I began to find life again.  I found a faith prior to religious contamination.  I open up.  I began to unfold as a person.  I find a new family. 

I had to respond to the encouragement to take risks.  Little by little.  When does a baby grow into a child who in turn grows into a man?  Can the moment be identified?  Neither can I tell you when the insanity of this alcoholic disease gave way to a satisfied sobriety, which in turn produced a man who needs to help others.  It just is.  And it is no less amazing.

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My alternative lifestyle has helped keep me from being sucked back into the religious box.  I have experienced both redemption and freedom, when I thought at one time that was a mutually exclusive proposition.  I remember being in church and hearing about the 12 step program.  I saw it as a bridge from a generalized spirituality to the true and specific spiritual life of Christianity.  But now that I have experienced the life and death scenario of alcoholism, I have seen the 12 steps as a bridge back to sanity.  And it was a bridge the church was never able to offer me.   My pain was met with concepts of repression and denial while I sat alone in a congregation.  It was the best they had to offer.

I hope that now I may become useful in a way I only dreamed about when I was more socially homogenized.  For someone, somewhere, the church is still a viable solution.  But we shouldn’t be kept so separated from one another that we are always looking to build bridges to the “correct destination.”  If we learn to fly, we can have it all.  We are the destination.

May your own personal mythology be fertilized with the magic of a childlike faith, unfettered by fear, recognizing no boundaries.  Its what I want for myself too.

When I first came into this program, there was someone who I talked to, who had the same sponsor as I did.  He was really one of my first contacts in the recovery network.  As time went on, he quit coming.  There was no answer on his cell phone.  Time passed, I would think of him as I trudged forward on the road to happy destiny.  What happened to him? 

Tonight, he reappeared.  He made it back in, and he is married and has a baby.  I cannot even begin to express the genuine relief  and joy I felt when I saw him.  If I was a woman, I would have wept right there.  Instead we joked and tussled about in a more masculine fashion. 

Now that I am alone, I weep.  He carries my stepson’s name.  He has a similar appearance.  And I buried my son last year because of this damned disease.   Sometimes I regret that I did not discover this way of life sooner.  I am so sorry that the best I had to offer him was religious fear. 

But I guess, in a way, he is with me as I join with others in our recovery meetings.  The significance of his life and death are apart of what it took to get me where I am today. 

I still love and miss him.

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I really did finish it.  Of course, now I have a headache.  But this right of passage document that I have been promising my son for so long is complete.  Now it is up to him. 

I feel better.  Except for the four hot dawgs I consumed with hot n spicy BBQ sauce. 

I think I will take a shower and go to bed.  Maybe that dietary obscenity will have a chance to works its way out.  Good Night.

This was the most nothing day I have had in a while.  I guess I should be thankful that it didn’t include a tankard of ale.  Or a bottle of vodka.   Or any other mind altering substance I could get my hands on.  And I am. 

I relented to my desire to pull away from everyone today.  I made no connections at all, except what was absolutely necessary.  That is probably not a wise move.  But I am tired of it.  I need some time to be a slug.  I need time to oversleep and masturbate to naughty thoughts and waste my life playing computer games.  I have been so nice to so many people that I am simply drained. 

So what now.  Do I attempt to do something productive in the dark of the night?  I am going to see if I can get the right of passage for my son written up.  I think it is about time for me to close this circle for both of our sakes.  I will try to come back here later on.  Maybe I will have it finished by then.

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Insuring immunity…intense work with other alcoholics.  I began to sink again, mood dropping.  In keeping with the surrender to the Higher Power, or the life swap, I sought intuitive guidance.  I was not really enthusiastic about the directive that popped into my head.  Pick up my sponsee and spend time working with him in a continuation of our Big Book study.  What I wanted to do was pull away, hide away.  My children are here with me.  There is something that changes within me when they are present.  I expect so much more from myself.  And yet I feel lost.  Issues for me to work on.  And issues for my disease to work on.  I followed the guidance.  I am out of the nose dive.  We worked on the second step while reading through chapter four, We Agnostics.  It turned out well.  We made progress.  We laughed,  relaxed,  experienced some sanity.  Gained another day. 

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There are so many things I am interested in.  It is real easy to get distracted from recovery, particularly when the obsession is no longer nipping at my heels.  But my picture of what sobriety looks like has got to be updated, become richer and more inclusive.  When I first come in, it is abstinance and a breath of sanity.  But that view will not sustain me.  It then becomes a surrender to a spiritual way of life.  It must manifest in service work and greater connections.  Then I must find others to help.  What is required for recovery grows, and the territory of my sobriety must expand.  There are no boundaries to maintain here.  Once I relax and say that I have arrived, I begin working the steps of this program backwards and unknowingly unravel my sobriety.  For others, the holidays is an excuse to find a place of respite.  For me, it is a time of increased vigilance and involvement. 

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The act of surrendering completely to the Higher Power is a little  surreal for me.  But it has been beneficial.  It releases me to respond to intuitive thought more freely.  Shortcomings are more quickly addressed, such as getting into on-line “discussions” and not being able to let go.  I can feel the tug that interrupts my obsessive thinking long enough to say “he gives blessings to his beloved in sleep.  Let it go.” 

I did well with push ups and sit ups on the Army Reserve PT test.  The run sucked.  But it was a run, I was trying.  I will continue to seek improvement, but if the Higher Power does not want this, it will not happen.  I am OK with that now.

A strong creative urge has come to life.  It has mostly been spent on one of my other web-logs.

I will go to another CA group that needs help and support, in an hour or so.  Time to get out there again.

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Tomorrow will be about 29 degrees at 6am, and feel like 26.  I will be standing with many other soldiers to demonstrate my physical fitness.  I have been here before.  But never with the baggage I carry now.  I remember a scene in the first Rocky movie that kinda captures the way I am feeling:

Rocky: I can’t do it.
Adrian: What?
Rocky: I can’t beat him.
Adrian: Apollo?
Rocky: Yeah. I been out there walkin’ around, thinkin’. I mean, who am I kiddin’? I ain’t even in the guy’s league.
Adrian: What are we gonna do?
Rocky: I don’t know.
Adrian: You worked so hard.
Rocky: Yeah, that don’t matter. ‘Cause I was nobody before.
Adrian: Don’t say that.
Rocky: Ah come on, Adrian, it’s true. I was nobody. But that don’t matter either, you know? ‘Cause I was thinkin’, it really don’t matter if I lose this fight. It really don’t matter if this guy opens my head, either. ‘Cause all I wanna do is go the distance. Nobody’s ever gone the distance with Creed, and if I can go that distance, you see, and that bell rings and I’m still standin’, I’m gonna know for the first time in my life, see, that I weren’t just another bum from the neighborhood.

I just want to be able to go the distance.  I know I’m being a little melodramatic.  But that is the way I am.  It is the way I feel.  The catholic church down the street is celebrating “Our Lady of Guadalupe,”  maybe I will follow Rocky’s example and see if I can get some sort of blessing.

Can this God of my sobriety be the God of my life?  Can the usefulness I find in sponsorship and service translate into a fulfilled purpose in life?  I feel like a little child who has pushed the doors open on the temple of my personal mythology.  I am excited, and unsure.  I step carefully inside, periodically looking back to see if the doors are going to trap me.  But so what!  This is my temple, for the God of my understanding!  There are treasures in here, I am sure of it.  I am surrounded by eight mirrors.  The images are different perspectives of me.  Once I stand in the center and each mirror holds a reflection, an energy fills the room.  It touches each of them and the two dimensional echos of my life become three dimensional images of interactive power.  In the union between myself and this Higher Power, they gain life.  Can this magic move beyond the mirrors?  I think it may be possible.

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