Forgiveness and Change

This week sees me grateful in celebrating my fifth month of abstinence.  And sad because my depression is a bit worse this week and I am feeling that acutely.  And to some extent, it's situational.  To a large extent, it is something I have welcomed into my life as a temporary price for making some big changes.

I have intentionally stressed myself and my food plan by taking a Food as Medicine class led by a local psychiatrist (also MD) and a naturopathic doctor.  The goal of the class is to improve depression by reducing inflammation responses in my body through changing my nutrition.  An important aspect of this class is an elimination diet.  In the last month, I have dramatically changed my food plan. I gave up bread and pasta first.  And then milk, cheese, cream (and that meant coffee went too).  Then eggs.  No soy.  And now I am gluten free as well.  I have pretty much changed to a lean natural source protein and vegetable diet.  I feel crappy and I'm told that is usual in the first week or 10 days or so with these kinds of nutritional changes.  I feel like I have the flu.  Everything hurts, I have a headache.  I am constantly getting hungry as my body screams "glucose!  fructose!  lactose!  give me any or all of those things!" 

It is really hard.  But I am doing this not to punish myself or deprive myself.  I am doing this by following the best available medical advice, knowing the results of my latest and most comprehensive blood tests, and trying to heal myself with every resource I can find.  I am fixing some vitamin deficiencies.  I am eating in ways that stabilize my blood sugar as much as possible (so I avoid developing diabetes down the road).  I am trying to reduce the inflammation in my body that stresses my heart and my arteries, raises my blood pressure, and swells my body.  I am eating to reduce the fat stored in my body.  Not because I am vain.  Because I no longer need to carry that protection which is killing me.

It is hard to face decades of not being at home in my body.  Of avoiding mirrors.  Of feeling unloveable.  Being willing to do the hard work.  Open to living very differently in such basic things as how I nourish myself. 

Knowing that to heal my soul and my body, I need to embrace all the feelings, accept all that has been, and know that the way forward is not easy, but it will be worth it.  (or maybe it won't be...)  But it doesn't matter right now whether this is the miracle I hope it is or not.  Because this elimination diet offers me a chance at feeling better, at healing myself.   I am worth this chance.  And I say to myself, "I am forgiving you for not being a perfect person and for being, in the moment, a depressed person.  I am grateful for a new chance at life."

UPDATE.  December 6, 2017.  I have reintroduced a bit of dairy.  I am not being super vigilant around eggs if they are in something.  But I am still avoiding gluten and wheat as well as soy - I think it may be helping.  Interesting.

Not Acting on Thoughts, Not Doing More than My Share

The reading in Voices of Recovery today talks about abstinence and how, although abstinent, we can still have compulsive thoughts around food when we are stressed, frustrated or depressed.  Uh huh.  I know all about that.  The reading continues:

Although I would love to have a complete freedom from such thoughts, I'm learning to accept that I have the mind of a compulsive overeater, a mind that automatically associates feelings of discomfort with the siren song of food.  ...No matter who strong my desire to eat may be, it's never the food that I really want; therefore, eating won't make me feel better.  If I am upset and craving food, I really need to connect with my Higher Power, to spend some quiet time by myself or to talk to a caring friend.  Thus, recovery has taught me that even though I may think like a compulsive overeater, I don't have to act like one.

This is reassuring in many ways.  I think I had made the assumption that if I still have compulsive thoughts about food, I am not abstinent.  But it's refraining from compulsive food behaviours, not thoughts, in our definition of abstinence.  It's not like I can control my thoughts.  I may be able to influence them over time with repeated patterns of behaviour, but I can't control my thoughts directly. 

Intergroup yesterday.  Lots more volunteers but all of them new to intergroup.  Good thing we no longer are enforcing the rules about attending for three months before you can be elected and having to meet the abstinence requirements or whatnot.  It's good to have new blood - there are people there who are not really contributing to Intergroup.  I expect they take the Intergroup news back to their home groups but that's about it in terms of contribution.  They don't actually do the work of Intergroup.  Maybe that's none of my business.  That's their journey.  If they are stuck, they are stuck.  If they are fine, they are fine. 

I was hurt and offended when I had three jobs and they had none, yet when the issue was raised, they did nothing.  However, the issue was raised and now I have one job.  It was a good lesson in me being serene enough to wait to see if someone else would step up or the position could stay empty.  I don't have to save the world.  I am only responsible for myself. 

Taking on too much is not good for my recovery.  I am learning to be consciously and responsibly selfish. I think it's important in our step 4's to look at these issues.  I am learning from the Al-Anon people that it is controlling and selfish to do too much for other people as well.  As I work my steps, I am going to read more closely for these issues -- control and doing too much as a sign of selfishness or ego.  Service gives me an opportunity to look at these issues in my life.

Blessed be.

Let's not louse this up. Let's keep it simple.

The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak. - Hans Hoffman.

I am feeling lost.  In some ways, I know what I need to be doing.  At the same time, I am unsure, uncertain, and overwhelmed.  It seems insurmountable to heal my body, my mind, my spirit.  I have teeny bits of progress and yet I still feel like I'm drowning.  Time goes by and it is as if I watch the clouds.

Today's reading is about simplicity.  It says:

One of the most profound utterances in the history of Alcoholics Anonymous is Dr. Bob's parting plea to Bill W, "Let's not louse this thing up.  Let's keep it simple," 

Overeaters Anonymous has its share of compulsive complicators.  They lard the program with mandatory procedures and other distractions.  If newcomers succeed in finding out what the program is about in this welter of the unnecessary, it may well be because they have an innate ability to simplify. 

For today, I pray to be reminded of the simple principles of this program, especially when I am tempted to present personal interpretations as the only way.

I was at Intergroup over the weekend.  What I saw were a lot of people simply showing up to report that their meeting has 6 to 8 people, one or two newcomers, and things are going well.  The vacant leadership positions -- literature coordinator, assistant treasurer, 12th Step Within coordinator, etc -- all went unanswered for the third month in a row that I've been there.  Do we need these positions?  Clearly we are functioning without them.  Why won't these people who show up each month take on a little bit extra?  I don't know.  They are not moved by the entreaty to service. 

This morning I am contemplating what I do for others versus what I do for myself.  I think I have a complicated relationship with being useful.  It reminds me, however, of the Marge Piercy poem.  I think it is true and pure, untainted by selfishness or ego.

To be of use
By Marge Piercy          

The people I love the best

jump into work head first

without dallying in the shallows

and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.

They seem to become natives of that element,

the black sleek heads of seals

bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,

who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,

who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,

who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge

in the task, who go into the fields to harvest

and work in a row and pass the bags along,

who are not parlor generals and field deserters

but move in a common rhythm

when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.

Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.

But the thing worth doing well done

has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.

Greek amphoras for wine or oil,

Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums

but you know they were made to be used.

The pitcher cries for water to carry

and a person for work that is real.

Blessed be.

Believe that Life is Worth Living

Be not afraid of life.  Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact. - William James

I have to think I have a belief that life is worth living or I would have acted on the desperate thoughts of wanting to end my life that depression brings from time to time.  It's not so much that I want to end my life but I am afraid of the dark relentless pain that racks my soul when the depression is at its worst.  It is enough to make thoughts of giving up seem appealing in the moment.

Fortunately, I am learning to be more brave, more mindful.  I remember more that these dark feelings of dread and despair do pass.  I can wait them out, like waiting for the weather to change.  Here, it can rain for months in the winter with no sunny day in between for reprieve.  I have learned to rejoice at the cloudy dry day even when I wish I could see the sun instead.  It is these small mercies, these small moments of grace, when I can accept what is, and see that things do change, even if slowly, that make it possible to continue on.

It reminds me of the mountain meditation by Jon Sabat-Zinn -- where we visualize the mountain, strong and firm, as the weather changes around us.  I found the script for that meditation so I am going to add it to the resource section for the days when it will help me to read it and meditate on its message.

Blessed be.

Shadow and Substance

Beware lest you lose the substance by grasping at the shadow - Aesop.

Today's reading reminds me that my recovery is spiritual first, and then physical recovery flows from that.  I have been feeling badly about my weight and -- well more accurately, I have been feeling bad about my physical condition.  I am still in pain from the car accident injuries, I tire very easily, and left to my own devices, I will sleep and eat carbohydrates. 

I was reminded, however, that my size is not so different than it was four years ago, when I wore a holiday top last night I hadn't worn for a couple years.  And my heart was feeling less depressed, less anxious, and less unworthy of going to a party than I did the first time I remember wearing the top. 

It is always fun to see the backstory to the little quotes that start off the For Today reading.  Today's quote is from Aesop, of Aesop's Fables fame.  It is the proverb which ends the story titled, "The Dog and the Shadow".  It reads:

It happened that a dog had found a piece of meat and was carrying it home in his mouth to eat it in peace. On his way back to his home, he occasioned to cross a wooden plank lying across a fast-running brook.  As he crossed the plank, he looked down and saw his own shadow reflected in the burbling water beneath. Thinking it was another dog with another piece of meat, he made up his mind to have that piece too. So, he made a snap at the shadow in the water, but as he opened his mouth the piece of meat fell out, dropped into the water, and was promptly swept away and never again seen.  Beware lest you lose the substance by grasping at the shadow.

Don’t let slip the things you have that are real and substantive in the pursuit of the ephemeral, the prospective, or the offhandedly promised.  My recovery is long term, every day, and real.  I do not need to chase quick fixes, magic potions or silver bullets.

Blessed be.

Growth and Patience: a new egg metaphor

We shall sooner have the fowl by hatching the eggs than by smashing it.  - Abraham Lincoln

I am tired and trying hard on some things, letting others slip.  I worry about my inconsistency and I feel lousy, physically lousy.  I am heavy again, really heavy, and I seem not to care.

Post script.  I do care.  I just have times of feeling lousy.  and then I pick myself back up and work my program.

Slow progress is still progress...

There is no fruit which is not bitter before it is ripe. -- Publilius Syrus*

Experience is not acquired without bruises and pain.  That's why I say I am grateful to be a compulsive overeater.  Without the disease, I would not know of Overeaters Anonymous and the twelve step program of recovery, which has been called a blueprint for a sane and happy life.

To wish for the rewards of growth without having to go through the growing pains is futile.  Avoidance of pain stops growth cold; and when growth stops, regression is next.  Recovery calls for going through each step, feeling all the feelings and having the patience to wait for results.

For today, I accept with gratitude whatever progress I am making, however small.

This.  I have been frustrated with my progress being slow.  Better some than none.  I am grateful for all that I have today.  Tomorrow will look after itself.

Blessed be.

*83-42 BCE, born a Syrian slave, freed and educated in Italy, famous for his proverbs and improvisation.  Famous too for the sayings, "a rolling stone gathers no moss", "it is better to learn late than never", and "no man is happy who does not think himself so".

Patience

Patience is a bitter plant, but it has a sweet fruit.  - German proverb

Waiting is one of the worst things to ask of a compulsive overeater.  If I don't see results immediately, I get discouraged.  In the days when I found one obsession with another, I dieted compulsively and jumped on the scale compulsively.  I could put up with any discomfort, any deprivation -- for varying lengths of time -- as long as I did not have to suffer a 'plateau'; to diet and lose no weight was intolerable.  Clearly, when something is intolerable, it is abandoned -- and so went every reducing scheme I ever tried.  Thank God I am not hear to diet and lose weight.

For today, I am in OA to turn my life around -- and I'm willing to wait.

As usual, the For Today reading is useful.  I am learning to have patience with myself, over and over.  It is so hard not to be rewarded for every little step I take with improved health, a more pleasing physique, a quieter more content spirit, and a less depressed mind.  But that is not how it works. 

I built up these defence mechanisms little by little over decades.  It is not realistic to think I can undo the damage or turn to more positive methods overnight.  Realistic thinking is not really my forte despite my considerable intellectual gifts.  When it comes to assessing my own being, I tend to be wildly optimistic (unrealistically so) or desperately pessimistic (again, unfairly so).  I practice, then, to be patient with myself and my progress.  One little slip isn't going to kill me.  One abstinent day doesn't fix everything.  But it doesn't hurt.

Blessed be.

In the moment

Only in a hut built for the moment can one live without fear. - Kamo no Chomei

Fear comes from projection.  My mind does not say, "This is a fine, pain-free, worry-free moment in which there is nothing to fear.  Therefore, enjoy it."  Instead, it leaps ahead, conjuring up all sorts of mishaps and calamities.

As difficult as it is to shed old habits, I keep remembering the relief and freedom and joy that came from the first time I tried abstaining one day at a time and not worrying about what would happen tomorrow.

For today, my life consists of single moments.  I occupy them one at a time, savouring the fullness of each, and find there is no room for fear.

Yesterday, I spent 1.8 hours at a counsellor on trauma.   And $110.  I cried.  My body has pain in there somewhere that just leaks out, over and over.  But as much as I was anxious, it was not fear.  Gentleness and pacing are two of the words she suggested I ponder this week as I practice holding space for my own healing.

Blessed be.

Feed your Faith and Your Doubts will Starve to Death

What do they say about choosing the wolf you feed?  What would life be like if I fed my creative wolf?  My spiritual wolf?  My curious, loving, snuggly, happy wolf?  Would my depressive, binge-eating, desperately sad wolf die?  Or would she just slink off, knowing she is no longer needed, I wonder.

It seems harsh to want my doubts to starve to death.  It seems perilously close to hatred.  I do hate how unhappy I see depression making me and several of my close friends and family.  I see potential unrealized in other people (and if I'm honest, in myself too).  I see despair and hopelessness.  It is true, however, that a little love just brightens up the depressed ones, even for a few moments.  Love shines up the hope, brings a smile, even a laugh.  Love makes it possible to get up and try.

So how about we feed our faith, our love, our compassion for ourselves...  and each other.  We are all trying, some harder than others.  Our burdens vary.  Each of us has to decide when and where to put them down. 

This passage is in the AA 12&12 (at p. 76) and it speaks to letting go of fear:

...primarily fear that we would lose something we already possessed or would fail to get something we demanded.  Living upon a basis of unsatisfied demands, we were in a state of continual disturbance and frustration.  Therefore, no peace was to be had unless we could find a means of reducing these demands.  The difference between a demand and a simple request is plain to anyone.

So let me request this of myself:  have patience, have faith, let go, just love.  My doubts will resolve themselves in their own time.  There is no need to starve anyone or anything.  This I know to be true.

Blessed be.

For Today: Changing my Reward Orientation to Longer Term

From the AA daily email this morning -- rewards, immediate or sustaining:

Sometimes when I've become willing to do what I should have been doing all along, I want praise and recognition.  I don't realize that the more I'm willing to act differently, the more exciting my life is.  The more I am willing to help others, the more rewards I receive.  That's what practicing the principles means to me.  Fun and benefits for me are in the willingness to do the actions, not to get immediate results.  Being a little kinder, a little slower to anger, a little more loving makes my life better day by day. 

I have realized my impulse toward "I want what I want, when I want it" is part of my compulsive behaviour.  If I take the time to pause, to consider what I (and my Higher Power) want for me, I stop and often make a different choice.  It's in the moment, in a rush, in an emotional upset, I make poor decisions.

And when I have a day or so of making good decisions, I want praise and immediate rewards.  I expect the scale to have gone down a few numbers, even though I've only eaten clean for a few days and binged for weeks before.  I expect my body to respond immediately and positively instead of taking our time to respond to such wildly changing situations. 

For today, I want to slow down.  Be thoughtful.  Act as if I love myself.  And keep myself from harm's way.

Blessed be.

For Today: My feelings suck but they are mine and I can feel them

One of the things I love about working my program is the "for today" meditation books, I have several.  And they always seem to have something that speaks directly to my experience and helps with the troubles of the day.

I was at counselling yesterday and it was difficult.  I am not used to feeling so sad and actually sobbing.  This morning I picked up the Melody Beattie The Language of Letting Go daily reader (Hazelton, 1990).  And low and behold, the reading for April 6th is on patience with feeling my feelings.  It's worth typing it out (for that seems to go into my head better than just reading it):

How sick and tired we may become of people telling us to be patient or to learn patience.  How frustrating it can be to want to finally have something, or to move forward, and then not have that happen.  How irritating to have someone tell us to wait while our needs have not been met and we're in the midst of anxiety, frustration, and inaction.

Do not confuse the suggestion to be patient with the old rule about not having feelings.

Being patient does not mean we go through the sometimes grueling process of life and recovery without having feelings!  Feel the frustration.  Feel the impatience.  Get as angry as you need to about not having your needs met.  Feel your fear.

Controlling our feelings will not control the process!

We find patience by surrendering to our feelings.  Patience cannot be forced.  It is a gift, one that closely follows acceptance and gratitude.  when we work through our feelings to fully accept who we are and what we have, we will be ready to be and have more.

Today I will let myself have feelings while I practice patience.

The part that hit home for me was "controlling my feelings will not control the process".  I have to simply feel, and be, and my recovery will come as it comes.  I cannot drag myself into more recovery.  I have to be kind to myself, feel how I feel, and trust the process.  Patiently. 

I remember how many people with 30+ years of sobriety at the AA Round-up a few weeks ago said they had to pray to live in recovery for the next 24 hours every morning.  They worked their program on the faith they too could have the recovery they see in others.  They weren't sure it was working but they did it anyway.  And eventually it worked for them.  These are the Promises of working a 12 Step program.  And I have to be patient to let them be realized in my life.  As the OA Promises say, they come sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly but they will always materialize if I work for them.

Blessed be.

For Today: Look Up

This is part of the meditation from AA this morning and I really like it.  I'm not slipping but I don't feel firm on my feet.  And I don't expect to.  I just want to keep going in recovery for the next 24 hours.

When climbing a steep hill, people are often more conscious of the weakness of their stumbling feet than of the view, the grandeur, or even of the upward progress.

Prayer for the Day

I pray that I may persevere in all good things. I pray that I may advance each day in spite of my stumbling feet.

For Today - Failure is Impossible

Failure is impossible.  - Susan B. Anthony

It is always a little bit odd to have the culture of a neighbouring nation outweigh your own.  Susan B. Anthony is an American human rights and feminist icon.  Enough of an icon that many Canadians will recognize her name and some will know who she is.  She advocated for women's equality and especially the right to vote tirelessly in the United States.  In November of 1872 she registered to vote and voted in the Presidential election. She was arrested for voting illegally and sentenced to pay a fine of $100 and the cost of prosecution.

In 1906, her 86th year, Susan B. Anthony spoke at the National Woman Suffrage Association and the title of her speech was "Failure is Impossible."  At the time, only four American states allowed women to vote.  It would be 1918 before Canadian women had the vote and 1920 for all American women.

I have tried to find the text of Susan B. Anthony's "Failure is Impossible" speech on-line and failed.  Ironic! It seems from reading Ida Husted Harper, The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony, volume III, that Miss Anthony may have said these remarks to friends, too ill and too elderly to do much speech making.  She is credited with saying this at the Baltimore Convention by the New York papers:

A report in the New York Evening Post said, "The entire house rose and the applause and cheers seemed to continue for ten minutes." It thus continued :

Miss Anthony looked at the splendid audience of men and women, many of them distinguished in their generation, with calm and dignified sadness. "This is a magnificent sight before me," she said slowly, "and these have been wonderful addresses and speeches I have listened to during the past week. Yet I have looked on many such audiences, and in my lifetime I have listened to many such speakers, all testifying to the righteousness, the justice and the worthiness of the cause of woman suffrage. I never saw that great woman, Mary Wollstoncraft, but I have read her eloquent and unanswerable
arguments in behalf of the liberty of womankind. I have met and known most of the progressive women who came after her — Lucretia Mott, the Grimke sisters, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone— a long galaxy of great women. I have heard them speak, saying in only slightly different phrases exactly what I have heard these newer advocates of the cause say at these meetings. Those older women have gone on, and most of those who worked with me in the early years have gone. I am here for a little time only and then my place will be filled as theirs was filled. The fight must not cease; you must see that it does not stop."

The For Today reader sets out "Failure is impossible" and then states whatever one believes is possible, is possible. What is clear from Susan B. Anthony's life and work, one may have to hold belief for a very long time.  And the timing of when the possible is realized is not our own.  But it is possible.

Today it is possible to be abstinent.  To live wholly, without abusing my mind, my soul or my body.

Blessed Be.

For Today - Love and Acceptance

Love is above all, the gift of oneself.  Jean Amouilh

My time is short this morning so I will take a break from the questions on the OA reading and writing tool, Slipping and Sliding, and reflect on the For Today reading.

I am learning to love wholly and without expectation or reservation.  Just like the way the members in OA have loved me.  The reading today says in order to give the gift of myself, I need to see how I have been avoiding it.  It suggests there are two ways of avoidance

1. to feel like I am worth nothing and that no one would want me;
2. to make it clear you should recognize how wise I am and follow my advice.

Wow.  I have lived in both of those ways of avoidance for decades.  They also read true with the co-dependency reading I have been doing lately.  And I have been actively working on changing both behaviours in my life.

The reading today says both the feeling of worthlessness and the feeling of superiority are protective shells:  neither is the best I can give of myself.

Giving of myself means giving quality time - listening to another without thinking of what I will say next; listening without giving advice; listening with energy and care; listening so intently as to forget myself. 

I am practicing this.  And I am a worthy work in progress. 

Blessed be.

Poem for today - Marge Piercy, To Be of Use

To be of use

BY MARGE PIERCY

The people I love the best

jump into work head first

without dallying in the shallows

and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.

They seem to become natives of that element,

the black sleek heads of seals

bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,

who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,

who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,

who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge

in the task, who go into the fields to harvest

and work in a row and pass the bags along,

who are not parlor generals and field deserters

but move in a common rhythm

when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.

Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.

But the thing worth doing well done

has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.

Greek amphoras for wine or oil,

Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums

but you know they were made to be used.

The pitcher cries for water to carry

and a person for work that is real.

Source: Circles on the Water: Selected Poems of Marge Piercy (Alfred A. Knopf, 1982)

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.