Recovery

Prayer: As a bird

/ Brian / 1 Comment

As a bird, when tricked by a mirror image of itself in the sky, will fling its wings against the frame, hindering its inborn ability to fly, so too do the illusions in my vision injure my capacity to soar. My soul falls from its deathless star, and my body crumbles to the hard wet sand. I crawl underneath a parched plant to await the desert of absence, or recover the truth beyond the pall and pale, your miraculous resurrection. Find me here, my battered Lord, and beat your name in my chest like a drum. Find me here, and let me come to the blessed recognition of the Word beyond death, beyond fear.

    Divisions and Unity; False Resting Place and True Resting Place; Inner Life as a Desert; What is the Word?; The Next Right Thing; The Sin of Dragging Feet; Secret Surveyor

    / Brian / 5 Comments

    The urge for life and the urge for death battle like embittered divorcees within me, divide my garments and vie for my unvarnished attention. The desire to zone out and numb myself of the pain of estrangement wrestles listlessly with the desire to focus in and reach the center of that pain. Some whittled intuition tells me I will find healing there, at the core of my suffering, that I can live fully only when I fully admit the part in me that does not want to live at all, and do not reject it.

    I am powerless to live truly on my own, for I am a divided being, too confused, conflicted, and off kilter to do the will of God. The best thing I can do is pray to God to grant me clarity, to give me the readiness to do His will, the patience to hear his voice, which speaks in Silence to my heart’s stillness, resting undisturbed beneath the turmoil that disturbs it constantly on the surface. Deeper than my divisions, perfect unity rests at peace, but I cannot get to that resting place by following my own will, and so the violently willful part of my self longs to be nil, as a false imitation of the true resting place, which resides in the depths of my heart.

    But much resides in the heart, and most of it does not encourage rest. My heart appears to lack the steadfast courage needed to seek peace and fulfillment within itself. It cannot find rest from the craving to be filled from the outside: by a drink, by a lover, by the sweat of the body as it moves. My heart seeks an outside God that will do all the work for it, but it does not let God in to do His work. It works itself up to a fever pitch until it cries out for it knows not what, twists itself into knots until the knots are all it knows. Who is it crying out for? I don’t think it is for God. No, it is attached to the very act of crying out. It is as if its distress keeps it in contact with itself, as if it is only through disorientation that it feels oriented rightly. Even-keeled serenity is too unfamiliar, alien terrain, too close to God for comfort. It is more comfortable for my heart to live on the rocky slopes of despair, painfully connected only to its own disconnection from its deeper and truer self, from others, and from God.

    Every time I surrender to the part of my heart that cannot love anything but itself, that takes a sick pleasure even in its own self-loathing, I take a step backward and down, off the face of the solid sunlit granite and closer to the shadowy sandstone cliff that falls away into the abyss. I take a step in the direction of living death. This was the surrender I chose each time I picked up a drink. It is the surrender that will eventually bring me to my knees again and again, but it is not the surrender in which I come to believe that there is a power that can raise me up again, restore me to the sanity of walking forward on two legs, trusting that the ground will keep me steady. Surrendering to my small self strengthens my pride and locks me deeper in the cage of my crawling ego, allowing no room for freedom to spread its wings, no fertile ground for humility to take root.

    Though I am unfree in a thousand ways, through practice and awareness I can become free not to surrender to the parts in me that want to keep me in bondage in the dungeons of my psyche, away from the sunlight of the spirit, far from its gentle breeze. I can choose to surrender my divisions each morning by kneeling in a posture of humility to the Great Uniter, with whom I was born to be in union.

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    It is hard that the experience of how pure and wonderful life can be, how liberated the soul can and was born to be, is so fleeting. My typical spiritual condition does not resemble a waterfall, overflowing with wonder and liberation. My inner life more often feels like a desert. I identify readily with words like desiccated, thirsty, desolate, barren, forsaken. I could travel all my life there, all the while thinking myself abandoned, and not find water, deaf to its quickening trickle, blind to its eternal presence beneath the desert floor. I need help to find water; I cannot find it on my own. Part of me does not even want to find it, for what if I find it, and drink of it, and still am not changed? What would that mean about me? That perhaps, after all, I was not born to drink the water from the source, and live? That there is no hope of my being resurrected, that healing and union will never occur, so I might as well call it quits? That God, or the nameless source of the pure water, will judge me as somehow unacceptable for baptism, not worthy to drink, a wedding crasher, a trespasser at the feast?

    Fueled by these fears—of rejection, of unworthiness, of being deemed ultimately unlovable—I do not seek the truth with all my soul and all my might. I do not put all my chips on the table. I hold a few back, as if there will be a better opportunity in the future, and I will go all in only when I am sure to win the hand. But the hand is not mine to win, because the only true winners are those who are entirely ready and willing to lose everything, to have nothing and be no one, so, not yet someone and not quite no one, yearning partly to be someone and partly to be no one, I loiter at the gates of nowhere, wander for years in the deserts of somewhere, dying of the thirst to live and dreaming of a river that will take me painlessly to the sea.

    Take me, river. I am yours. I have always been yours. I am not mine. There is nothing here I can call my own. All of it was given me. I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but only say the word.

    Whose soul shall be healed? My soul is not mine either. There is nothing here. Lord, give me all of this nothing. There is so much here. There is nothing missing. I am missing everything. I am missing the point. What is the word?

    The point kissed me on the lips, and I called it an invasion of privacy. I filed it away in the cabinet of experience that didn’t make sense, that didn’t confirm my prior beliefs. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of Life.

    I do not believe. Help my unbelief. Breathe into me and through me, restore me to sanity. There is no sense in keeping these masks; they mask the glory of God. I mask the glory when I ask that the glory be mine. Not grace, not life given, but earned salvation. I cannot receive the gift. It is too much. How can a man bear it? How does a man learn to bear the beams of love?

    He starts by doing the next right thing. He starts by starting out the day in silence, listening to the birds, the wind, his heart. He starts by asking his heart, ‘What song will you sing this morning?’ Is it a song of praise, or one of sorrow? There is always a song to sing. A song of sorrow is just another kind of praise. The heart is sorrowful because it knows how much it longs to give praise, and yet it cannot. It cannot raise itself from the swamp, move itself from the dark cave out into the light.

    I do not know how to thaw these chronic thoughts in the warm sun of a new perspective. It is almost the end of winter, but I cannot sense the coming spring. Where does stillness stop, and paralysis begin? I don’t want this still ice pond of winter; I want the rushing snowmelt of spring. I want to run until I drop, until I fall flat on my face and like a snake shed all these outworn skins. What is the next right thing? Far beneath this cold skin lies a heart hot with unspoken desire, but I do not have the strength to dig beneath these pounds of ash to uncover the burning coals, and breathe them into flame.

    Where will I find the strength? Who will hold me as I shiver, afraid to submerge my naked body into the icy river? I want to give myself without reservation, but I reserve the right to conclude I have nothing to give. When I finally admit I have no high aspirations to live for, only then will I begin to live from deep within. I live under the sin of dragging feet, struggle daily with the dragons of monumental reluctance, curdled longing, and sagging eyelids that keep the lid on medicinal laughter and laugh cruelly at all my efforts to be free.

    Lord, have pity on me. Give me the strength to at least not waste precious hours pitying myself. The days repeat themselves ad infinitum, ad nauseum. But no, the days are not the same. Now it is sunny; tomorrow it will be cloudy. Yesterday it snowed, and today it will not. Each day is different, but I remain the same. I repeat myself ad nauseum, and wonder why I feel like a museum piece. Cease and desist, rinse and repeat. Let me not police my every thought and action, as if it is only through armed vigilance that I will feel safe at long last to be myself.

    Secret surveyor, let me alone. It is not your place to keep me tied to this tired play, playing forever the tired and defeated, the mired and caged. I am not a slave to your savage demands. I can stand here without your crushing, kill-joyed, life-span-shortening support. Is that cool, sport? The hearse waits for no one and does not care how far you still had to go. I still have to be here. Correction: get to be here. It’s time I get going.

    Why Wilderness Therapy Works

    / Brian / 2 Comments

    Why does wilderness therapy work when other therapies don’t work? The word is wilderness. No person is healing another person. No one is the healer, no one the healed. Out in the wilderness, away from everything that makes it necessary to need healing, healing comes naturally. It doesn’t even look like healing, like recovery. In wilderness, recovery is not the final goal. What good is recovering what you have lost if you don’t uncover anything new? The wilderness allows for uncovering in addition to recovery. You begin by recovering the aspects of yourself that were lost to the addiction, compulsion, mental disorder, whatever. Then you begin to uncover aspects of yourself that you had never known about. You uncover aspects of yourself that do not belong to you alone. You uncover aspects of the world that also happen to be aspects you share. You recover the fact that you are capable. You can hike many miles in a day, you can make a fire, make a shelter. You can survive; you are worthy of your existence. You uncover the fact that you are more than capable, more than worthy. You discover a power that has nothing to do with superiority over other people; you discover a love that cannot be expressed, a love that comes into you from nowhere and out of you towards no definite object; you discover a sense of belonging that does not need to be identified and has nothing to do with other people. You discover the stillness at the heart of things, and in your own heart. You wake up the morning after the storm, and all the trees are still standing. You look at them and feel their strength, their robust aliveness.

    The wilderness heals when words fail. And don’t words always fail? Ain’t talking, just walking. Let us walk together through the woods, both of us pilgrims, “searching ones on the speechless, seeking trail.” What are we seeking? If we knew, would we be speechless? Perhaps we would. Don’t we seek life, and is it true that life also seeks us? It certainly seems that way. Each person is sought by life, let’s call it, to give what only that person can give. We are sought and called in order that we might call back in answer, ‘I am here, and I will remain. I am here to answer the call of the one who seeks me, the one who I seek.’ And is it one who I seek? It could be one, it could be none, and it could be many. I seek the place where the one are many, and the many are one. I seek the place where there are none but myself and yet I am not the self I thought I was. Not another soul is there, but is that the truth? I seek the place where I become no one. Nemo. Everett Ruess disappearing into the red rock canyons.

    What does it mean that wilderness therapy works? Is that the right word for it? Yes. This is Gurdjieff’s Work here, the work of awakening, of becoming one’s authentic self. Do you think you are already yourself? Maybe you are, I couldn’t know that. I know I am not, not completely. I am a fragment of the whole self. There is always further to go, more work to be done. I’m not there yet, but in the wilderness I do not worry about being not there. Where am I not? Where I am not is unimportant. Where I am is what matters. Being where I am is how I move towards who I’m not yet, who I could be.

    Of course, there are moments of despair even in the pure clean air. There are moments of despair everywhere. Nothing we can do to escape those, especially when we’re in the wilderness. Where to go? What to say? What to do? Can’t drink, can’t get prescribed anything, can’t drive through the night, can’t rob a bank. Just keep walking, I suppose. Walk straight into it. Will the despair pass through and away like a storm from the east? Who knows? No use in minimizing it, rationalizing it, idealizing it. No use in talking about it at all. Ain’t talking, just walkin’. But even in the wilderness, that strange human desire for verbal utterance is still there. Very well, speak then. But it is important to choose your words carefully. The human words must somehow do justice to the inhuman beauty of the place. This is exceedingly difficult, and oftentimes it is better to melt into the silence. To become a part of the inhuman we become inhuman ourselves. Inhuman not meaning ‘unfeeling’ or ‘cold’ or ‘cruel’, but as defined by the poet Robinson Jeffers in his philosophy of Inhumanism: “A shifting of emphasis and significance from man to not-man; the rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the transhuman magnificence.”

    To become part of the inhuman, we must not focus so much on the human. What was your relationship with your parents like? With your romantic partners? What do you remember about the trauma you suffered at age 7 when your parents accidentally packed you tuna for lunch, forgetting that you preferred pb + j? Well, I think I was enmeshed with my parents, or maybe abandoned by them. All my romantic partners left me, or maybe I left them all. The trauma with tuna, I think, is still affecting me in a deep and significant way today, as I instinctively recoil whenever I see anything remotely fish-like. Whatever. These human questions and answers fade into insignificance in the wilderness, as they deserve. They are not integral to The Work.

    What is integral to The Work? Jeffers knew it. It is integral that we recognize the beauty of the inhuman world and feel a part of it. Recognize the human and the inhuman within us. Envy and equanimity. Anger and serenity. Vanity and authenticity. Fear and courage. The jealous, prideful, and possessive love, and the detached, humble, object-less love. The desire to fade into the shadows and the desire to be pierced with and surrounded by light. The passion for success and recognition, the continual striving; the sea receding from shore in the night, the vast sky overhead filled with light.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAK3gpWvn1w