My friend hooked me up with some friends of hers who do this thing they call The Abundance. Every Friday, they get the culled items from one of the local organic-produce delivery companies, and they set all these awesome veggies out in boxes on the side of their house, send out a text message and it’s free for the taking.

I went for the first time a few weeks ago. There were boxes of little potatoes, big green leeks, leafy Swiss chard, peppers, onions, grapes and my favorite apples - Jona Golds. It was like an awesome, free farmers market, and…

Thanks to Barbara O’Brien:

“Hungry ghosts are pitiable creatures. They have huge, empty stomachs, but their mouths are too small and their necks too thin to take in food. Sometimes they breath fire; sometimes what food they do eat turns to ash in their mouths. They are doomed to live with incessant craving.

The Hungry Ghost Realm is one of the Six Realms of Samsara, into which beings are reborn. Understood as a psychological rather than a physical state, hungry ghosts might be thought of as people with addictions, compulsions and obsessions. Greed and jealousy lead to a life as a hungry…

I’m feeling awful tonight, and I have a resentment stewing. I’m angry at my partner for his bad planning. I’m angry because he chose to spend all his free time this past week playing xbox, and now I’m sick and he needs to go study for a test so he can’t be here to help me with our daughter and her Halloween costume.

Normally I wouldn’t care, but tonight my head is full of snot, and I had to work today and I’m tired. I’m afraid to take any decongestant because I took some last night and had crazy anxiety dreams…

“Around me I see many people who make a far better job of relating themselves to God than I do. Certainly it mustn’t be said I haven’t made any progress at all over the years; I simply confess that I haven’t made the progress that I might have made, my opportunities being what they have been, and still are.”

Bill Wilson wrote those words above in 1958, just before his 24th AA Anniversary.  His honest appraisal of his shortcomings and his willingness to discuss them are a lesson to me, and perhaps to you as well.  How many of us, in…

I guess I’m in detox from my drug of choice.

I feel sick and empty inside. I can’t stop my eyes from leaking. I feel needy and desperate and I want to make somebody come take care of me.

I feel like I’m never going to be ok, ever again. I think that I know I will be ok, but I can’t feel it right now. I can’t get comfortable with myself. I can’t be still. I can’t sleep. I can’t think.

I want my husband, and I can’t find him. I could find his body, but he isn’t inside it. I don’t…

“If we can start seeing relationships not as the goal but as opportunities for growth then we can start having more functional relationships. A relationship that ends is not a failure or a punishment - it is a lesson.” Robert Burney
In writing the sex relations part of my Fourth Step, I started thinking back over the past romantic relationships. I’ve been thinking since I wrote the names down and what I did and what harms I caused, that many of those relationships were just part of the lessons in life. I wanted to find out what it was like to…

When people see some things as beautiful,

other things become ugly.

When people see some things as good,

other things become bad.

Being and non-being create each other.

Difficult and easy support each other.

Long and short define each other.

High and low depend on each other.

Before and after follow each other.

Therefore the Master

acts without doing anything

and teaches without saying anything.

Things arise and she lets them come;

things disappear and she lets them go.

She has but doesn’t possess,

acts but doesn’t expect.

When her work is done, she forgets it.

That is why it lasts forever.

Since I’m spending the evening in bed nursing a sinus infection, and the pressure in my…

I

It’s not meant to be. Not right now, anyway… Picking up the pace to beat the “Don’t Walk” sign yesterday just about made me scream. My right leg needs time to heal, I guess, so no marathon for me this weekend. No running at all, I think. I have a doctor’s appointment next week to check this out, but ultimately, I think I just need to rest.

I love rest, but I hate forced rest! I also hate the fact that I was in great shape to run a good marathon only to be thwarted by the weather! And now, injury blocks…

It’s been a year since I started Suboxone treatment. A year and a few days actually - the anniversary date came and went without my noticing, and it was only me racking my brain to try to figure out something to write about that made me realize that it’s been a year.

I went back through the old posts on my blog from this time last year. I was just a couple of days into my treatment and I was having a really shitty day.

I packed up Little C and off we went to my job, and I drove a different…

Tonight, I am very, very angry at my husband’s disease. I’m angry because I remember the sweet man I married, and that man is nothing like the man I’ve been living with over the past few weeks.

The reading in our Nar-Anon daily meditation book today, which was about detachment, said:

The addict has to take care of his or her own life struggles, as we have to take care of our own lives. They may not see there is a problem if they never have to experience it. It is my responsibility to take care of me and my life. By…

Sometimes I try to give people who are struggling with addictions a little chizik.  Chizik (rhymes with whiz-ick, hard “ch”) is the Hebrish (Hebrew/Yiddish) word for strength. 

I tell them a quick story a patient told me a long time ago, but the message still works.

I imagine the old-timers in the 12 Step programs tell annecdotes like these over and over again.

An abused teenager cuts school to get high, with or without her friends. She’s severely depressed. At some point her family garbage has worn her down. She used to get good grades. She used to care about people.  No longer.

She’s only 15 and already has a…

So why shouldn’t I juggle too?  I’ve been juggling already.  Figuring out how to live sober has been really, really tricky. I don’t even think that, on balance, I’m very good at it.  I’ve complained about the big chunks of my life that really aren’t working, that I struggle with, that I’m apparently unwilling to fix, but I’ve also come to believe that I have a natural failure level.  No matter how high the bar is set, I come in X percent below it.  So if I want to achieve more, perhaps I should just raise the bar high enough to…

I’ll be sharing these great little gifts I get every morning. Hope they inspire.

Your Humble Road Warrior

www.gratefulness.org
WORD FOR THE DAY
Tuesday, Oct. 28

Try pausing right before and right after undertaking a new action, even something simple like putting a key in a lock to open a door. Such pauses take a brief moment, yet they have the effect of decompressing time and centering you.

A life practice from Br. David Steindl-Rast

The new, slow pace of my life has changed my focus and deepened my appreciation for all the clear, simple moments which I arrive at each day. The carpet of new-fallen leaves covering the path in the park, a hug from my daughter at the bus stop, her face in the window as the bus pulls away around the corner, the flurry of finches wings in the Japanese maple tree in our back yard.

Tonight I saved my energy to cook for my family. I’ve been getting better at the kind of cooking where you wing it - fixing a tasty…

The BBC reports that retired drug dogs have found work in the private sector–sniffing out teenagers bedrooms.

The company, appropriately called Sniff Dogs, operates in New Jersey and Ohio, and was founded by a mother with a guilty son.

For $200 a parent can rent the dog and handler. That amount of time should allow the room to be fully searched.

These animals have been trained to detect illegal drugs and have such a keen sense that they can smell marijuana up to 15 ft. away, as well as two day old smoke residue.

It is nice to see a business that helps parents…

There are lots and lots of ways to learn to live a sober life, and addicts and alcoholics aren’t the only people who are looking for meaning in life.  And wether we find meaning in a church or a meeting or in the mindful experience of everyday living, it is always accompanied by some kind of faith. Finding meaning means believing in something that is possible to doubt, like the trustworthiness of an idea or a transcendent reality or a Supreme Being.

AA’s founder, Bill Wilson wrote that the foundation of his sobriety was faith, “faith that, despite all worldly appearances…

My husband and I have a special association with the weekend that marks the end of daylight savings time (or rather the weekend that used to mark the end of daylight savings time, since the powers that control such things have moved it around lately). Nineteen years ago, on the day we turned the clocks back, I met Mark. We joke that things were meant to work out that way to give us an extra hour together.

And while the time doesn’t change for another week yet, Mark decided to honor the old daylight savings weekend with a gift. He took…

We went to his parents’ house to have dinner tonight. It’s the first time I’ve been around them in a while. I didn’t deliberately decide to stop hanging out with his folks…it just kind of happened. I’ve been working like crazy since last May, which is around when I stopped spending as much time with them. Once it happened, however, I recognized that there was a significant drop in the drama factor in my life. His mother and father are both addicts, and so engaging with them is exhausting.

His mother and father have both made little remarks to let me…

A version of this video was played on ESPN this morning in conjunction with their World Series coverage. If this doesn’t remind me to keep life in perspective, nothing will.

John Challis\’ Final At-bat

Challis apparently has inspired many, including current World Series manager, Joe Maddon. Maddon writes Challis’ message, Courage + Believe = Life, on each game’s line-up card. Challis passed away at home on August 18, 2008.

Sometimes I think my problems are huge and insurmountable.
Thank you, John Challis, for reminding me they are not.

I’m always suprised by the variety of people who comment about one of my tattoos. What first catches me off guard is the sudden hand coming at my sleeve to peek higher. Aren’t we Americans usually so tentative with our space?

People with no tats, people with tats, gray hair, Dolce & Gabana sunglasses, my mother, John Deere shirts, polo shirts, ironed pants–basically, across the board of stereotypes. All across the country they’ve peeked.

It was pretty significant, this one tat, even more so than the rest which decorate my body. I’m not sure what initially attracts people; the part most visible…

Mr. Quitter and I went out with some friends tonight. They are newish friends, a nice couple with a one-year-old baby and another one on the way. They’re family-focused people, not into partying, but we all get along well.

We went to the zoo for the Halloween festivities and then out to dinner. It was fun, and dinner was good, but now I’m just wiped out.

It’s weird, going out with people that I’ve never done drugs with. Most of my friends still smoke pot, and all of Mr. Quitter’s friends do. I have one friend who is in recovery, and she’s…

A few days ago, as I was sitting in my living room writing, two smiling grey-haired women knocked on my front door. They handed me a pamphlet titled “Would You Like to Know the Truth?” and told me it had answers to many of the questions people ask about life and about God.

A few years ago I would have been angry and resentful that they interrupted my writing time to try to push their God on me. I would have mocked their pamphlet as full of opinions masquerading as “The Truth.” I would have torn it apart, bit by bit,…

My husband came home from our last adventure in separation with a nasty cold, and he’s passed it along to me. My brain is full of gunk, and I can’t seem to get out of bed for very long. I’m a little freaked because I have such a huge stack of work to do, but I’m kind of thinking that my Higher Power might be looking out for me in this sickness. It’s been about 3 weeks since I’ve taken a full day off, and I’ve been wishing I could get a day with absolutely nothing to do.

Today isn’t a…

When I was working on the sex relations part of the fourth step, I remember thinking that this was probably one of the most difficult parts of Step Four. It’s all part of being honest with myself, but I really didn’t want to look back at my sexual history.  I’ve had my share of passionate moments and when putting it all down on paper, it made me realize that in lots of cases, I had very selfish motives.

I cared for several of the women that I was involved with but in some cases it was just to fulfill something in…

I was out walking with my daughter today, and she wanted to feed the birds. She didn’t want to feed the birds breadcrumbs or birdseed though; she wanted to feed them berries and acorns and pinecones we found along the way: things they could presumably just fly on down and eat if they wanted to. But not trusting them to pluck or find what they needed, she decided to pick these delicacies for them and pile them on the sidewalk where they would be easy to find.

When I was about her age, I lived near a field of tall grass…

I know I’m supposed to understand alcoholism as a disease which makes people act stupid and say dumb things. I do understand that. Understanding this sad fact is supposed to help me forgive those stupid words and actions. I know. It’s a disease. They can’t help it. I know, BUT…

I have a friend, Toby (not his real name), who relapsed about 6-8 weeks ago. Toby has been around the rooms of AA since, I believe, the 1970’s. He knows AA, its jargon, and how it all works (or is supposed to work) better than just about anyone. When he speaks,…

I was thinking about sharing at meetings. I’ve heard people share in lots of different ways. Some people have to vent their frustration. Some have a great deal of sadness that pours out. Others are profound. Regardless, sharing doesn’t have to be deep or philosophical. It can just be an expression of gratitude. For newcomers, sharing can be especially hard. It’s probably intimidating to talk in front of a group and bare your soul. I was ready to share at my first meeting because I needed to get so much of my story out there. I have shared at every…

In the bleary, early-morning light of the kitchen I measure the fragrant, brown beans into the hopper and hit the “on” button on the grinder. The harsh noise focuses my attention as I watch the coffee grinds appear. When the crunching of beans gives way to the whine of empty, spinning blades I switch the machine off. The water is heating in the coffee press, tiny bubbles forming on the bottom of the clear glass pot. Within minutes the whole pot is roiling and churning as it comes to a full boil. I count the tablespoons of grinds as I…