Another Christmas come and gone. I do enjoy the festivities, to a point. I love the Solstice, the quiet of the earth here in the NW, time with friends and family, the lights...  And, today I’m ready to take down the tree, over the edge with crowds and traffic and images on TV of people going mad at the mall. It can be challenging to balance the sacred with the material world of buy, buy, buy! We aren’t huge gift givers, but simply navigating in the world is harder during these December weeks. On a positive note, has anyone else noticed how our meeting attendance goes up this time of year? We had four or five out of town visitors at our home group, and every meeting I’ve been in since Thanksgiving has been full. We come together in times of need, and these holiday times can be emotionally triggering.  Thank you, HP, for another day clean and sober. Thank you for the holidays coming to a close.

I’ve been listening to a Bob D (Las Vegas) CD. He describes how he fought recovery for so long, in and out, unable to slow his mind enough to hear the message. I feel fortunate not to have had that experience. I have an image of the drugs and alcohol exiting my system, leaving that God-shaped hole that we hear about. I then picture a vacuum, kind of like the sound of a can of coffee being opened, that sucked in the principles of the program. I’m certainly not implying that I understood much of anything at the beginning, but I did experience the immediate comfort of feeling like I’d come home, like this was what I’d been looking for. That was not my experience a month earlier, when I detoxed in a hospital for four days, then left. In that case, my daily habit was missing and all the vacuum sucked in was the frigid air of want and craving. Of course I got high again. What happened in the interim? I hit bottom, precipitated by seeing my face in a mirror as I searched for a vein that wasn't there. In that tiny, little snap of recognition that I was killing myself, I realized that I needed to stop, and became entirely willing to do what whatever was asked of me, having no idea what that meant. 

Bob D. talks a lot about the “disease of the mind,” and how his unmanagebilities were mainly on the inside. Yes. When I went to treatment, I had a car, and a nice home, food (mostly beer) in the fridge, and my mother was still speaking to me (though my other close friends barely were), so the outsides looked reasonably ok. But on the inside, I was shattered – grieving the ending of a relationship, knowing I was incapable, at that point, of supporting myself, feeling like whatever life spark that is me was about to flicker out. We often hear about the gift of desperation – I hope I never forget how broken I was prior to being graced with recovery on January 3, 1986. 

As I seek to cultivate internal stillness as the year ends, I take a mini-inventory:  How did I contribute this year/what do I feel good about? What truly matters to me at this point in my life, and how am I living those values? What do I want to learn/create/practice/experience in the coming year? What do I want to release?  How would you answer? What else comes up in your year end inventory or intention setting notes?

See you next year, kind reader. Thank you for continuing the journey.  (As always, the reminder that you can sign up, on the right side of the page, to receive these posts in your email, delivered each week on Thursday)