For Today - Waiting

Despair.  Reaching the end of a given road in our lives - or the end of the road of our lives in addiction - we find ourselves at a point of despair, recognizing our powerlessness, not knowing where to go next or if we can even begin again.  Sometimes it's a matter of waiting through this painful moment, allowing the heart to experience what comes, to feel its way through darkness, and to emerge with whatever it finds.  We have come to Step One.  - Marya Hornbacher, Waiting, A Nonbeliever's Higher Power (Hazelden, 2011)

On page 1 of chapter 1 of Waiting, Marya writes about driving toward the Canadian border in January for reasons she can't quite explain.  Driving toward a place where maybe the landscape will match the emptiness she feels spreading through her chest.  I know this emptiness.  I live in this landscape.  She continues:

There are times when the heart burrows deeper, goes tunnelling into itself for reasons only the heart itself seems to know.  Thay are times of isolation, of hibernation, sometimes of desolation.  There is a barrenness that spreads out over the interior landscape of the self, a barrenness like tundra, with no sign of life in any direction, no sign of anything beneath the frozen crust of ground, no sign that spring ever intends to come again.

And I know this internal landscape.  But I also saw snow drops in bloom yesterday.  As sure as this despair is here now, I know, from experience if not from hope, that spring does come.

With the help of two wise friends in OA and a very strong meeting last night, I have recommitted to asking my Higher Power for patience with the changes that take time.  I have faith that I am exactly where I am meant to be in this moment.  It's hard and it hurts and I cry.  But that's ok.  Tears don't kill me.  It's the times when I am not able to cry that I am at the most risk.

Right now, the tears are always close.  They spill out and slide down my face, like water weathers stone.  Maybe tears are my soul's way of smoothing out the rough edges, of softening where I hold on too hard or set myself against Nature. 

 My For Today reader quotes e.e. cummings this morning:  "To be nobody but myself, in a world which is doing its best night and day to make me everybody else, means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight and never stop fighting."  This is definitely the hardest battle I have faced and continue to face.  The despair is real.  And the fleeting moments of hope are just enough light in the darkness to make me reach out for change.

The reading today ends with this -- which seems as good as any ending for a piece of writing.  "In accepting myself as I am, I accept God's will for me today.  Only through self-acceptance am I able to change."  I can live in this tundra.  I know there are snow drops pushing against the dark, the cold heavy wet earth of January.