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after that thought, nothing more needs to be said, as recovery has certainly freed me of the chains that kept be from being who i could be and certainly wanted to be. for the past eighteen months or so, i have been blaming an event in my life for becoming who i was not. as life-changing as that may be, when i heard a peer sharing about the familial “conditions” that “drove” them to active addiction, i realized that i was just being a whiny baby and the time had come to move on from what happened, how i reacted to that event and live my life in the here and now. the tenuous link to a life where i had to assign blame, needs to be severed once and for all, if i am going to use the gift of freedom i have been given.
in the past month i have been in two different jails, by choice. Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin Ireland and one less than thirty miles away from my home. Kilmainham is no longer in use and is a testament to the cruelty of the British over-lords that kept the Irish people impoverished for centuries, finally planting the seeds of the sectarian violence that plagued the island for decades. the local gaol as it were, is where i “got” to go in and carry the message that those who are incarcerated there could find and enjoy the freedom i have been given. they certainly will not need to lay down their lives to be freed from the oppression of addiction, but the work, as i have discovered, sometimes takes decades to get to root of what is not quite right, and is never-ending in its scope.
when i got clean, not a soul promised me that as a result i would get to see the world, climb to the top of the world, or have a life that went beyond my wildest dreams. they did promise me, freedom from active addiction and that there may be many gifts that came from that freedom, not the least of which would be knowing who i was and seeing who i could be. just for today, i am grateful i could be of service and carry the message into places where there is little HOPE of something better. today, i have carved out the time to make a meeting and hang with my peers. i may not be making this a recurring appointment with what i need to do, but i can certainly be grateful that, just for today, i will be at a place where my peers are congregating and sharing in the freedom i have found.

∞ DT ∞