Blog entry for:

to appreciate the world around me.
first off, feeling much better today, it seems that my body is starting to deal with the abuse i put it through on Monday afternoon. the **meh** feeling and the pain are gone, and i am ready to once again commute into work. no fake news or “unpresidented” here and to deny the fact that i could have made the journey to the office yesterday would be lie, i could have but chose not to, it is as simple as that. the one thing i can say for certain that i have received form my recovery experience is the ability to ̴own” my stuff and not blame, obfuscate or tap dance around it. i am so amazed by those who attacked the government for the past eight years, whining about how they “deserve a chance” and “let's forget everything and now be friends.” they created this situation and now want to sweep it all away with words such as mandate and movement, when neither really exist. the fact is, they did make this bed and now they get to enjoy laying in it. enough political analogies, for what it is i am writing this morning. just as the conservative political correctness is filling the media these days, so i did everything, once upon a time, to cover the fact that i was far from a member, i was not an addict and if evidence to the contrary was even rumored to exist, i destroyed the messenger.
i was incapable of having any sort of spiritual awakening until i owned the fact that i was an addict and decided i wanted to do something about it. there was even a period of time, when i noodled around with the idea of becoming the deal;er to the fellowship. the only thing that stopped me, was just no supply. when i first admitted i was whipped by the justice system, it was only a very tiny and glacial move towards finding this new way of life. little did i know that a few years later i would be writing about the nature of my spiritual awakening and the form it has taken, because i finally too the time to listen to, actually see and appreciate the world around me. no, not like some sort of Ansel Adams type, but more like Stephen Hawking. taking in all the detail and trying to weave an accurate and realistic picture of what is going on in near-space and real-time. once i stopped working so hard to build the case that i was NOT an addict and accepted that not only was i am addict, there was a way out, i became ready to be taught, and that started the series of spiritual awakenings that have brought me to where i am today.
after a rather spiritually tumultuous trip through the steps, this morning i can speak about what the nature of my most recent spiritual awakening is, after all, between that very first and today, there were many and very few happen all at once in real-time. the spiritual awakening of this last set of steps is that i am just one of the pack. in my own way different and certainly unique, but i have rejoined the human race, but more importantly i have a better sense of who i am in the fellowship that is my home. i am one among my peers, and my peers are all those who share the recovery path i found in this fellowship. sure there are some who come and go and tell us how the other fellowships do their recovery. it is true that i get all pissy and butt-hurt when they come around and tell us what to do, like some ugly tourist that goes abroad and then spouts off how terrible everything is there. the reason that i allow this to affect me so much, is that i have developed a passion for my fellowship and the message it seeks to spread to the still suffering. that passion makes me want to be more and protect those with less time from the ravages of a mixed message and the notion that all fellowships that are 12 step based are the same. that however is a topic for another day, and i will end with this: my spiritual awakening has not been a series of events, rather a long and sometime arduous process that builds on all that i has already come to pass. it is the photograph of this moment, that i can capture and preserve, because in the next, it will be different. that is the problem and the promise of living a program of active recovery.

∞ DT ∞