Doin' Time

No rest for the wicked, because the return from our long-awaited trip to Italy was right into the madness of a very, very full October. I stole an afternoon last week during which I attempted to be autumnal — stopping by a roadside farm stand and purchasing six massive pumpkins to take up to the land. My husband has been working on the house long past daylight, and I thought it might make him smile to find some absurdly large gourds tucked around the property. It did indeed bring some joy, but his was quickly outshone by that of the various forest creatures who’ve now chomped the pumpkins into oblivion. You’re welcome, forest creatures, I guess.

After a coffee meeting one afternoon, I went up to the build (we've called it “the land” for so long, and now there’s almost a house on it, yet it feels strange to call it “the house” when we still have so much work to do on the whole thing). There is an old access road that will become a part of our low-key gravel driveway, and it extends back up onto the bluff through a canyon of tall hardwoods and exceptional moss. If the wind is high, you can hear the crash of waves against the bluffs from the west side of the coastline, but the trees protect the path from too much disturbance. It was a crisp afternoon — perfect for long wool skirts and boots — and I strode through the overgrown west of the access road like a viscount traversing my estate. There is one small circular clearing overseen by a chunk of limestone. Near the rock is a patch of burnt earth still flaking into the wind where my husband camped one night last summer. I spread my skirts out upon the rock and sat for a moment, kicking the mud from my boots against the stone.

It feels almost scandalous to be surrounded by such goodness. You know, when I first started attending recovery meetings, everyone spoke about “promises” and some transcendent “fourth dimension,” and I just sort of nodded and thought that certainly none of that would be possible for or present to me. I don’t know quite where I tripped over this belief, but for some reason, I remained convinced that the most I would ever get out of recovery would be some companions and a string of days (God willing, months) of not drinking. That was enough. Just a friend and some sobriety. That would be enough.

But I had a truly fourth-dimension weekend last week, and I was quick to share it at the Monday meeting. The word I kept thinking of was “scaffolding.” There was a solid, hope-filled scaffolding around the weaker places of my heart, and it was shaped like the forest and my husband’s hands and dilapidated pumpkins and exceptional moss. I felt like I could truly just sit on that rock and rest. Where in the past I would’ve sat and dramatized a litany of personal grievances, that afternoon I was overcome by the gifts of crisp wind, wool skirts, and the numinous, solid reality that I was home.

There was a weird moment this past weekend (a week after the numinous rock-sitting), when I was having dinner out of town with a well-regarded colleague and he functionally asked, “what is someone like you doing in a place like that?” Someone like me (?) doing in a place like…the one where I come from (?). He said: “What is someone who reads five languages and is friends with [prominent scholar in my field] doing living in the woods and preaching to fifty people when you once preached to two thousand and spent time at [prominent institution in my field]?”

I’ve been here long enough that the question perplexed me. How could someone ask something like that when I have more friends than I’ve ever had in my life? When I’ve been sober longer than I’ve ever been in my adult life? When I wake up next to the love of my life and walk around land that I get to tend and where my literal job is to take care of people in a place where people are in need of care? It has been so long since I’ve even considered the fact that none of this is very glamorous.

Is there an elegant way to say, “I was dying, and this place and these people caught my decaying personhood and scaffolded me back into the land of the living?”

How do you say, “I needed to heal from alcoholism and burnout and if my face was going to be in the dirt, I wanted it to be near good moss?”

What’s the kindest way to say, “I don’t care about prominence or success anymore, I just want to serve God and help people and not die and be quiet for substantive portions of my day?”

On October 6th, I was celebrating seven months of sobriety. At the meeting that evening, there was one woman celebrating one month, one man celebrating seven months like me (I have two “sobriety brothers” at our meeting — for whatever reason, we all tapped out of drinking during the first week of March), and one woman celebrating thirty years. For such a remote place, we just have the most excellent meetings with the most excellent variety of human beings. What a gift to be able to learn from each other at our various points along this trudge of happy destiny.

The woman celebrating thirty years is one of my AA moms, and after the meeting, we exchanged hugs. She held me fiercely and said, “keep going, honey, it just gets better.” And I believed her.

I am so bad at being a beginner. There are a lot of things in which I am not a beginner, and I enjoy spending most of my time in the midst of those things, so it is a rare and humbling thing to regularly admit that I am new to something and that I have even more to learn than I’ve thus far been able to imagine. It is humbling for me (“someone” “like” “me”) to sit at the feet of ex-cons and ex-thieves and biker bar parking lot philosophers and ex-wine-moms and to have to just shut the fuck up and learn something. It’s like I’d become quite good at showing off my designer casts, when what I truly needed was this stone-cold group of punks and drunks to set the bones. It hurts, but it is the only possible way to actually heal.

Sometimes my time in sobriety feels abysmally brief. I’ve been embarrassed at my month count, and I’ve been tempted to lie. Especially when I travel and drop in on meetings, people assume I’ve been around much longer than I have, and I’ve been so tempted to keep up the appearance. I run meetings as a part of my work, and I’m good at it. I have a strong voice, and I am used to being in charge, so it’s easy for others to just hand that sort of thing over. But every time I’m tempted to step into undeserved authority, I try to remind myself of that re-authoring relief I experienced in my first weeks of recovery when I realized that I no longer needed to lie. I no longer needed to pretend or to hide. Here — finally — was a place I could just be.

There’s no need to minimize seven (!) whole months of healing. No need to feel inadequate next to someone with thirty years. I’ll get there (oh how I hope I’ll get there, one day at a time).

At my home group, we have a tradition where when someone is receiving a chip, the whole group passes the chip around before it is given. Everyone takes a moment holding the chip in their hands and saying a brief prayer or sending some good wishes to the person who is to receive it. When the recipient is presented with the chip, they are then also receiving all of the prayers and encouraging hopes of the whole group. The first time I saw this, it moved me to tears.

On the 6th, the guy sitting next to me nudged me to open my hands. Into them, he dropped the four chips for the evening: one for thirty years, two for seven months, one for one month. I cupped those little coins in my palm like a treasure, holding them close to my heart and praying for each of us. For my AA mom and her bold courage. For the new girl, finally at one whole miraculous month after many weeks of struggle. For my sobriety brother with his glorious tattoos and beautiful wife and adorable son who are so, so proud of him. For me and all of whatever this is.

One day at a time.