It’s the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, a holiday I’ve particularly loved since I’ve been in recovery. It’s about food and gratitude and I plan to be awash in both! As far as gratitude goes, what I think I’m most deeply grateful for is the deep comfort I feel with just being myself and living my own life.

It comes of course from my partnership with the great Whatever (H.P., God, whatever), from working the Steps, and from the fellowship.

So here’s to life and all it gives me for which I’m thankful.

Okay, I had to have very minor eye surgery, which required that I be awake. After talking over the risks/rewards with my doc of taking Valium (given that I am a drunk and a junky who’s–hallelujah–in recovery) I decided to risk 2 milligrams in the interests of having my best shot at avoiding permanent eye damage.

Since I’m sworn to tell the truth, I must admit that a very high percentage of my pre-operation thoughts were fixated on taking that pill. I was both appalled and amused to realize that I WAS LOOKING FORWARD TO IT!!!! I beamed right back twenty…

This is a hopeful country, right now. Perhaps a hopeful world.

After a decade of what felt like partisan bickering for bickering’s sake, it feels to me as though we’re abruptly willing to slow down, chill out, and start looking for each other’s  good qualities again. All around me, I’m aware of people reaching out to one another, finding  areas of agreement instead of dispute, open  to working together addressing  the world’s formidable problems.

Boy howdy, does it feel good.

Of course, many credit our president-elect for the resurrection of hope in this country. I saw Senator Obama speak and would be hard-pressed…

Okay, it was bound to happen. Everybody who rides a motorized bike is going to drop it at some point.

Perhaps its just that I wasn’t expect to have trouble leaving my own driveway. But there I was caught in the drainage ditch on the other side of the dirt road I live on and going down.

I was going about five miles and hour so there was plenty of time to jump clear. Charlie had gone on ahead on his bike, so I was on my own with a two-wheeled vehicle that weighs considerable more than I do. Plus, I was…

Yes, I’m tired. Something we all learn early in sobriety to guard against. I can feel that my whole being is stretched a little thin. But the deal is, there’s not a lot I can do about it till the weekend. I’m deep in public radio fundraising, on deadline for NPR, and have a book proposal that just won’t come to heel nicely. So, tired or not, I gotta keep on keeping on.

The thing is, I’ve got enough sense to recognize fatigue as being a non-desirable state. When I was still drinking and using, I pushed myself to the edge…

Sorry, I’ve been away. No reason, except too, too much to do. But, you know, I missed blogging, so, you know, I’m just going to find the time.

I spent Friday fretting our world economic crisis and the disturbing appearance of blatant racism in the American presidential campaign.

Saturday and Sunday, I spent a good part of the day scooting.

On a scooter.

A 151 blue teal blue scooter that allows me to travel curvy country roads at speeds that don’t annoy whoever’s behind me and reacquaint me with what it feels like to just be having fun.

Both days were beautiful. Warm and…

to go so long between posts. I had another piece in the Chicago Tribune and have been spending my spare moments responding to the many, many interesting e-mails it generated.

Here ’tis. This is part of a larger piece that I’m working on about being in partnership with God. I’d be grateful for any and all feedback. Really, really, really. . .

Knowing that voice within

An atheist father teaches his daughter to do the right thing, and from there she finds God

By Martha Woodroof

July 27, 2008

Ashley Bryan, 85 last Sunday.

The Warm Springs Gallery in Warm Springs, Virginia (population around 900) had an opening for a rare exhibition of his paintings. Bryan is best known as a writer and illustrator of children’s books. He was one of the first persons of color to present images of children of color in picture books that were not stereotypical. He was, as Poet Nikki Giovanni put it at the opening, a real pioneer.

I was working, of course. On assignment. Yet I can’t remember when I’ve had a better time hanging out with anyone. I think I was not alone…

Multi-tasking.

I’d like to suggest it’s the antithesis of sobriety–at least of the all-important part of sobriety that’s manifested by a calm mind.

I re-decided this (for the 89th time!)  a couple of days ago while  talking on the phone while e-mailing someone else while simultaneously doing a web-search while trying to block out a too-loud hall conversation among my colleagues. My mind felt as though it were being–as a wonderful editor friend of mine likes to put it–as though it were being pecked to death by ducks.

I’ve often resolved to just do one thing at a time, but I can never…

God and I can only partner in any useful way in the real world, and the reality is that the real world often makes me uncomfortable.

I’ve certainly done my share of damage by shying away from my own discomfort. Back in the early nineties when I was first climbing out of addiction, I ran a railroad crew hotel for about a year. It was the last remaining business in a once-thriving town. At the time, I was filled with the desire to save people as I, myself, had been saved—filled with it to the point of omnipotence. I was certain…

and decided that I sound just too-too spiritual and perfect sounding. In fact, I thought I sounded like the kind of person I wouldn’t enjoy lunching with at all.

So I feel a burning desire to make one thing clear about my personal code of conduct (that’s the title of my last post). It’s very much about the way I act, not about the way I necessarily feel.

In other words, sobriety hasn’t turned me into a saint who always feels kindly toward everyone else on the planet. I’m still annoyed with people about 50 percent of the time. What sobriety has…

I have a code of conduct, but it’s far less specific than it used to be back in the days when I used such a code mainly as a Richter scale for measuring the strength my current rebellion.

These days I try to be kind, thoughtful, completely honest with myself (an ever-evolving process) and as honest with others as kindness allows.

I try to approach people who are different than I, or who don’t seem to be behaving as I think they should, with curiosity and compassion, and without judgment — which is still a huge struggle for me, particularly…

I make my living reporting for public radio, which means that I spend my days having conversations with folks I don’t know well. And as I do a lot of feature work–as opposed to hard news, a lot of those conversations go on for quite some time.  A successful in-depth interview requires me to help the person I’m talking to relax and just talk to me about what they think or feel or have experienced.

I used to think that to be successful, this kind of interview had to be done in person. But then, as I began to do more…

This appeared in 81–a regional publication that I love. Like most of what I write, it’s about issues that are relevant to sobriety.

lastwords

June 2008

Crossing the Jordan River
So What About God?

by Martha Woodroof

I began school in the Southern Bible Belt before the Supreme Court removed prayer from the classroom in 1962 with Engel v. Vitale. I was the daughter of an agnostic and an atheist. Jesus was every child’s friend but mine.

On some Monday mornings, my teacher—Southern sweet and impenetrably groomed— would purse her lips and ask any student who hadn’t been in Sunday school to stand up. When I…

Our Head Cat, Mr. Lewis, is old, has feline HIV and has been on his dignified way out enough times to qualify as the definitive proof that cats have nine lives.

Lewis’ latest flirtation was death involved a bad reaction to a new medicine for joint pain. He stopped eating–and I mean stopped. We began syringe feeding (we’d been through that before), but as Head Cat’s baseline weight hovers at about 7.5 pounds, there wasn’t much wiggle room. Charlie and I were soon calling for help.

Our wonderful house-calling vet galloped to the rescue, bringing medicine to heal Lewis’ stomach. I was…

Had this essay come out in Sunday’s Chicago Tribune, and I was amazed at the response. So, I thought I’d post it here and see if any of you had anything to say about what I had to say.

Age before beauty is true view

By Martha Woodroof

May 25, 2008

For me, 60 need not be the new 30. I’ve already been 30, and I prefer adventure to repetition.

I do still dance uncontrollably in grocery store aisles, but I’ve moved way beyond the person I was at 30. And I have no desire for anyone to take me as anything other than what…

I really believe that sobriety is about living and let-living, forgiveness, tolerance, and getting along with others–and this certainly includes our neighbors.

That’s one of my neighbors in the picture. I just discovered that she took a recent stroll through my gardens, leaving huge holes where flowers used to be.

Sometimes, sobriety is a real challenge. . .

Here’s the deal. I just finished the second draft of my second book, which has the working title, God Is. Now What? It’s basically about having a working faith in God outside of the confines of organized religion. The manuscript is up at my agents, but I’m frankly hungry for feedback. Below is a piece of the “Note,” which opens things up. I’d love to hear reactions just to this tiny portion. What I’m trying to do is be part of what I see as a change in our conversation about faith.

“One bright May morning my husband Charlie, who’d just read the…

I’m rotten at doing anything with visuals, but I wanted to stick these up, because Shadow asked for them. There are six of these babies. They make it very hard for me to pay attention to what I’m supposed to be doing.

I’m back in the office and, to celebrate, my foxes brought out their kits. I went running (literally) around the office letting my very dignified and very mature colleagues know. They in turn came running (literally) into my office and we all stood around ogling this chubby furry creature  scarfing up my bird seed.

There are four of them, I hear. I was at the physical therapist’s (durn!) when the other three came out for a viewing. There was evidently more running and more ogling.

You know, life is good. It’s hard to come back to the office after doing nothing that…

Okay, I’ve been clean and sober for quite a long time. Enough time to have gotten and hung onto a great job, husband, house and 2 cats. In other words, I’m an official grown-up and proud to be so.

However–and I do love this–there are still times when I feel like a kid playing dress-up, and, yes, this is one of those times. I’m posting tonight from one of the guest houses at Montpelier, James and Dolley Madison’s ancestral plantation, all thousand-plus acres of it in Madison County, Virginia. The place is almost at the end of an enormous, multi-multi-million dollar…

I am a fan of the frankly gaudy, and so am in love with a certain local Chinese restaurant–not as much for its food as for its decor. There are enormous crystal chandeliers everywhere, lots of shiny red stuff, huge aquariums full of enormous golden fish. The staff sports shiny clothes and barks at each other in staccato Chinese, which sounds exotic and slightly stern to my American ears.

I treasure what I think of as the small moments of theater that happen in my real life, and two of them occurred at The Dragon Palace–both at holiday times. One took…

The above image is from bedouinweaving.com.

Just finished the first draft of a story on a Charlottesville, Virginia, woman who is helping Negev Bedouin Women market their traditional, hand-woven rugs in this country–and not as a money-making endeavor for herself.

Political realities forced the Bedouin to end their traditional nomadic life in the middle of the last century. The Negev Bedouin’s settled in villages and towns as the poorest of the poor. The men took factory jobs, but the women–once integral to herding, harvesting, weaving, and home-keeping were left without anything useful to do or any way to make money.

Prue Thorner, the…

  Charlie rescued these from an old house that was being emptied way back when I first knew him. Wherever we’ve lived, they’ve always gotten the place of honor in our gardens. Whenever the garden gods get planted and flowered, that place feels like home.

I love their peaceful faces and the way they seem to relate to each other. They are separate, but they are so obviously interconnected. Just the way I want to be with the people I care about.

Over the weekend I finished up the second draft of my second, very short book, working title: God Is. Now What? One of my main points is that we cannot use religion or spiritual practice to hide from reality; in other words, we have to live in the real world, exactly as it really is and learn to handle all the ambivalence, indecision that reality produces inside us–not to mention anxiety, confusion and down-right fear. Faith, in other words, is not about us feeling comfortable–it’s about us doing what we can that’s actually helpful.

Back to my foxes. Molly’s comment about…

A colleague took pictures, and I thought it would be nice to post them since I’d written about them. Aren’t they something magical to have show up outside one’s office window? We’ve been debating whether or not we should feed them. Any thoughts would be welcome.

I had to give a talk last night in a town where I lived when both my drinking and my head were beginning to go bad. It’s a place that I cannot drive through without finding off a sense of hovering unease.

But it was also while I was living in this town that I made the switch from television to radio, and so “came home” professionally. It’s where I was when I first began freelancing for NPR–long before I knew what I was doing, of course, but I wasn’t about to let that stop me. Lack of chutzpah has never…

I almost never have time alone at home. Charlie doesn’t work and he’s a real homebody, so he’s usually in our house whenever I am. I’m alone on the road when I travel, but almost never, ever within the walls of my home. Charlie’s just always around, making me laugh, keeping me company helping me out…telling me how to boil water, feed the cat, organize the kitchen cupboards. Charlie, you see, is a bit of a hoverer.

Well, Charlie spent all of last weekend away, helping his brothers and sisters sort through my beloved mother-in-law Lola’s stuff in order get her…

My work office is in a small city of maybe 45,000 people. I’ve written before, I think, about the scraggly lawn outside my window that’s backed by scraggly woods. Charlie installed a bird feeder for me, and I also sprinkle food directly on the grass and dirt for birds who prefer to ground feed. I can have a couple of dozen birds at a time, along with a half-dozen squirrels and a bunny or two. Once I had two deer. Now I seem to have attracted a pair of gray foxes.

They are healthy looking animals–sharp-faced, bright-eyed, about as big as…

I had to go to traffic court last week.

Way back when, on Virginia primary day, I had to drive all over this part of the state, visiting polling places and reporting live from them. The day was a nasty and cold day, with wet, spitting snow. Charlie, who worries, sent me off in his Toyota truck with 4-wheel drive. (As an aside, he and I are an interesting study in contrasts–I’m the original yee-hah girl, he is Mr. Caution. It makes us very good for each other. He keeps me from spiraling off into outer space on a whim; I…