Paths to Meditation

One evening during a meditation on the Sixth and Seventh Steps, these words seemed to flash in my mind. We were entirely ready to have God remove all the defects of character, and we humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings. ~ Courage to Change, page 31

Simple. So simple, but the words leap out —
a meditation on the Sixth and Seventh Steps...
I'd been aware of meditating on the written meditations,
of selecting a passage and building a poem,
my way of learning to meditate. I've joked...
it's not a joke if it's real, though, is it?
I've tried to pretend I actually wrote these poems
as a way of meditating. I know I am, know that happens,
but what I'm doing is getting another poem cranked out,
having something more to stick out here
so that in four more poems I can brag I've done this,
written a poem, posted it, gotten something posted
even if written long before...that in four more days
I will have done this a thousand days in a row.
And is that meditation, stopping in the middle to check,
to find out how many I lack? It's not, it's pride,
it's avoidance, it's procrastination. It's refusing
to learn to meditate. But this one sentence, this thought,
gives me the idea to meditate on a step, a tool,
a tidbit of recovery, and in doing that I can get further,
can move closer, to true meditation, to understanding
what recovery is, what — who — my higher power is,
how to meditate in one more way. And by two thousand
I still won't have "reached" the knowledge
but I'll be a thousand days closer, one by one.