Who's RUNNING This Show?

We constantly remind ourselves we are no longer running the show... ~ Alcoholics Anonymous (Kindle Location 1206)

Yump, dum, duddle-duddle,
yump, dum, duddle-duddle...
let the show begin! Lions, tigers,
elephants, bonny young ladies
on the flying trapeze...
I fancy myself loud-voiced, brash
announcing the acts, accepting awe.
Yet, within, I know I can no better
run the circus than I could juggle
six clubs while riding a unicycle.
I'm a failure at keeping things going,
at managing the show.
And therein dwells comfort, euphoria,
real joy in merely giving up
and enjoying the spectacle
just doing my part and letting
a Power run the extravaganza.

Twelfth Tradition

TWELVE - And finally, we of Alcoholics Anonymous believe that the principle of anonymity has an immense spiritual significance. It reminds us that we are to place principles before personalities; that we are actually to practice a genuine humility. This to the end that our great blessings may never spoil us; that we shall forever live in thankful contemplation of Him who presides over us all. ~ Alcoholics Anonymous Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, page 192

Principles rather than personalities.
Meaning more than just don't sink to baseness,
hold the greater good in front,
don't break anonymity. Rather, a path
to genuine humility, immense spiritual significance.
Somehow producing a miracle of forever life
in thankful contemplation of Him who is.
Greatest blessings they are, forever.

Due a Superior

The deference — “respect or esteem due to a superior” — clarified who was in power, who I should believe in, and the reason for giving over my shortcomings. ~ Voices of Recovery (Kindle Locations 2091-2092).

Salute. Stand when they come in.
Words of respect, deference.
Curtsy, bow, pay homage,
give tribute, yield to.
Respect for the role, the authority
without difference for who, for merit.
In military or in school,
in corporate structure or courtroom
observers grasp a pecking order,
who's in charge, who to believe,
who will lead. And see the path clear
so independent thought and decision
no longer remains a burden to bear.

Simple, Is It?

Belief in the power of God, plus enough willingness, honesty and humility to establish and maintain the new order of things, were the essential requirements. Simple, but not easy; a price had to be paid. ~ Alcoholics Anonymous (Kindle Locations 368-369)

The process is simple — not easy,
but simple. In fact, it seems intelligence,
education, analytical ability get in the way...
The sayings communicate the idea.
"Easy does it." "One step at a time."
"Just do the next right thing."
But then again, how simple is pie...
or pi for that matter? Making crust
will drive you crazy! And getting it tender...
Nope, not easy. Just a few ingredients,
a few "simple" steps, but not done without effort.
Recovery's not easy either, simple though it may be.
But the result — well worth whatever it takes.
And that's what it takes.

This Hour, This Place

Happiness, not in another place but this place…not for another hour, but this hour. ~ Walt Whitman

"Go to Hell!" he'd yell.
"I live there!" I'd answer,
a refrain, well rehearsed,
believed. Owned.
Time passed. Separation,
return, some kind of truce.
The place is not Hell,
the relationship not hopeless.
I can live in this place.
When I long for other places,
other time, other circumstances
I gain only discontent.
When I accept this place, this time,
I find I, too, am accepted.

Martyrdom

Martyrs screw things up. ~ Ernie Lawson

Constantly suffering, displaying and exaggerating distress...
playing the martyr, afflicted by the abuse, the misunderstanding,
the lack of appreciation. Poor, poor pitiful me, I think I'll eat worms.
But worms aren't enough. Surely I deserve better. Who could question
my need for a bit of comfort in foods that sooth my soul?
I've the right to respect, to compliments,
to being appreciated when I work my fingers boney.
Maybe they didn't ask, but I know they want it, and then ignore me,
despise me for being a bit testy when I wear myself out, when I do —
insist on doing – these things they so little recognize. Martyrdom fits me.
Or it did... Now I've given up striving to please. Now I simply do right,
doing what I know is my next right thing and somehow when I do,
appreciation and smiles flutter down like pedals in return.

Fact or Feeling

Is it a feeling, or is it a fact? ~ Julie Trudeau

When I've not eaten a minimal amount,
when the body requires food, that hunger is.
It's real. When I "deserve" a treat, when my need
rises to a roar because of the cruelty of the world...
When I punish the woman who told me I'd had enough
by hiding away to eat a whole cake...
When boredom drives my car to the drive-through window
and the clerk already knows what kind of Blizzard I want
or hands me the apple fritter or turnover...
That "hunger" bears no reality, holds no truth,
is a lie, a feeling masquerading as a fact.

Who I Don't Want to Be

Now willing to listen and take suggestions, I have found that the process of discovering who I really am begins with knowing who I really don't want to be. ~ Alcoholics Anonymous, 4th edition, pages 456-457

I'd guess standing at the edge
of the promised land, all those years later,
the Hebrews knew not what waited,
what to expect, why this promised place
merited the dreams. But they knew
the wilderness passed through,
the cruel pharaohs, the bitter herbs
of slavery. If God who'd freed them
called this land good, who were they to doubt?

I stand in the rooms of recovery
hearing promises and forecasts
hard to believe possible, not understanding how,
what changes could occur, how these miracles
might feel. But looking back at misery,
insanity, hopelessness, loneliness...
I know better than to draw back,
to want what I know. Oh, no!
What's to come is more mystery than majesty
as I conceive it, but it can't be worse
than where I've been, what I've known.
I'm ready, willing, for direction and hope.

My Soul Mate

I love you more easily than myself,
feel for you, ache for you, as you walk
into these rooms. Your pain, fear, desperation
confound my heart with memories—

no, far too calm a word.
Residual angst, assonance,
antiphony. You and I are one
sharing imaginings, madness, this stage.
You are the frightened child within me
I've fought so long to accept and love.
I love you more easily than myself
and loving you...love me.

No Residual Battle

“When the individual accepts, on an unconscious level, the reality of not being able to handle compulsive overeating, there is no residual battle.” ~ Overeaters Anonymous, Second Edition.

I surrender. I put down my weapons —
fear, rationalization, denial, rebellion.
I wave a white flag showing my vulnerability,
my intention to take no action
other than seek to talk, to understand, to communicate.
My hands hover over my head, empty, unarmed.
I remain silent, your prisoner, under your control
speechless so I can influence nobody.
I allow you to take from me the weapons, tools,
devises I might use. You may tie me up,
stop me from acting on my own.
It is your right to protect me, to separate me
from other people, from support, from standby behaviors.
I surrender. I will do as you say, ask instructions,
welcome your input. I will obey, do as you beckon.
Heal me, console me, give me peace and acceptance
so I wonder why for so long I did not surrender.

Look Fear in the Face

If I did not look fear in the face, I would not know what it was made of; and if I did not know my fears, I would not feel them. Compulsive overeating did an admirable job of helping me bury my fears alive. ~ For Today (Kindle Locations 1900-1901).

I can hold fear at bay for a while,
in little pieces. After all...procrastination
means chronic, low-intensity fear.
I'm good at procrastination.
But at bay is still there, omnipresent,
oppressive, suffocating, choking.
Food works, too, smothering, strangling,
slamming it down, hiding it,
buried under frosting, ice cream, sugar...
Compulsion – any kind...genealogy,
knitting, puzzles, stupid computer games,
work, study, busy-ness – keeps it away,
hides it, postpones it. But it's still there.
Until it's not. It took time to know how,
but it's simple, easy as it can be...
"We ask Him to remove our fear
and direct our attention
to what He would have us be.
At once, we commence to outgrow fear."*

*Alcoholics Anonymous (Kindle Locations 990-991).

Without Knowing

Telling God what to do —
even if in the form of requests, prayers —
controls nothing. God takes no orders
from me. Nor does life make sense,
at least sometimes. Important times.
God told Job it was none of his business
to know the whys. "I'm God, you're not.
Drop it." Would I sit there and take it
if God answered so? Maybe. Maybe not.
Would I understand, just because he said so?
No. Probably not...certainly not.
But it is none of my business
and I don't understand.
And probably never will...

Jonathon Scott Rollins
July 20, 2008

To Speak for God

Dear Lord of life, my hope, my joy —
I see your path for me.
You ask that I be your envoy
To set your people free.

You call for me to teach and lead
The high, the low, the poor,
To show the path that you’ve decreed
For those I stand before.

But like the prophets called of old
To speak your holy word,
I bow my head; I can’t be bold.
They’d laugh. I’d feel absurd.

Isaiah spoke the words I mean,
“My lips are too impure.”
I’m low, I’m dumb, I am not clean.
How can I serve you, Sir?

You cleansed his lips with fiery coal.
You answered Moses’ fear.
You made the shy apostles bold.
Send me. Your grace I’ll share.

Dose a Day

I started this blog,
a poem a day, flung out
to the world, words of faith,
of hope, of recovery...
I started it as a tool
not of serenity, of surrender
but to market, to hype.
Day after day, seven hundred
ninety-eight days, each one.
I stay to recover, to share it,
as a tool not of book sales
but of freedom, of willingness,
of doing the next right thing.
I started this for the wrong reasons
and have watched God use it
to remodel me.

Wickedness

Since no man knows the future, who can tell him what is to come?

No man has power over the wind to contain it; so no one has power over the day of his death. As no one is discharged in time of war, so wickedness will not release those who practice it. (Ecclesiastes 8:7-8, NIV)

Wickedness will not release.

How do you break free?

Only with the aid of a higher power.

The higher power can give you power.

Power over the wind to contain it?

Maybe.

Power over the day of your death?

Absolutely.

Not to change anything,

but to have serenity.

Power to be in the presence of peace.

Peace doesn’t release you, either.

God, hold me in your peace.

Let me always remember

you’re tougher than wickedness.

The meditation is taken from A Time for Verse.

Cleansed

I hated to carry my friends
for the car spoke volumes
to those who knew
of car-veiled hedonism,
of fast food shoved quickly
to hide the evidence,
save for the crumbs that clung.
Long time past, car washes inane,
the particles lingered
awaiting the OA NCIS,
the eyes of those who knew.
But long since the deviant excess
the slivers lied of the present
but recalled the brutal past.
But who could know?
A simple cleaning, scrubbing,
reclaiming...could speak of abstinence
rather than dismay.

The Comfort Factor of Lies

There is never any final comfort in a lie. However closely we may have hugged a lie to our bosom, the moment we see it to be a lie, we should be wise to part with it. Those who take refuge in a lie are like those who take refuge in a flimsy storm shelter made of three-ply wood painted to look like stone. When they want the shelter most, it will let them down. ~ Leslie Weatherhead, The Will of God

I told lies because they were easier,
a pathway circumventing yelling,
a way to maintain icy silence called peace.
I told lies to look bigger (metaphorically)
and smaller – thinking they'd believe my numbers
and not their "lying" eyes. I lied easily,
naturally, sometimes when the truth worked better.
I lied to him, to the world, but mostly to myself.
When the hidden truths were augured out of me
and I finally excavated deep truths, I kept the lies
for the comfort, the commonplace, the role.
Yet little by slow I learned truth-telling,
truth owning, honesty. And the shelter, the refuge,
the security of truth opened my eyes
and welcomed me home.

The Turnabout Table is found in Slender Steps to Sanity.

A Humain God

"But, John," I said quietly, "isn't that just what you have accused God of doing when you said it was his will? Call your little boy's death the result of mass ignorance, call it mass folly, call it mass sin, if you like, call it bad drains or communal carelessness, but don't call it the will of God." Surely we cannot identify as the will of God something for which a man would be locked up in jail, or put in a criminal lunatic asylum. ~ Leslie Weatherhead, The Will of God (pp. 12-13).

God is love, not vengeance —
especially against innocents,
just because of kinship or relationship
with others to "learn a lesson."
God's reasoning scoffs at the mother
who wants the child next to hers swatted
so he'll get the message, he – her child...
God loves and even when we understand
not at all he has acted in love,
consistent with established rules
but seen through the whole lens
and not the skewed vision of those hurt,
bereaved, feeling cheated. God doesn't cheat
nor break the rules – his own rules —
when it would make him a wishy-washy God.

The Precise Extent

It is plain that a life which includes deep resentment leads only to futility and unhappiness. To the precise extent that we permit these, do we squander the hours that might have been worth while. ~ Alcoholics Anonymous (Kindle Locations 961-962)

Precise — marked by exactness,
accuracy. Extent — an area covered,
the size of scale of something.
Precise extent, imminently measurable,
exact, defined, established methodically.
An exact measure of what seems so amorphous...
the degree we permit resentment.
And that computes with the squandered hours?
How deep my resentments have been, are...
though less than in years past. Squandered hours
compute backwards, then, to the resentments.
Can I get rid of the squandering habits
or must I surpass resentments first?
Either way, each result is beneficial...
I really don't care which comes first.

False Front

My false front was so exhausting I had to make it up to myself somehow, and the one sure way to do that was to eat. ~ For Today (Kindle Locations 1870-1871).

I would have told you the easy way out
was pretending to appear what I wanted to seem.
Being who was expected, matching clothes,
looking like others, make-up when friends started,
gossiping, trying things repulsive, fitting in.
I've learned, though, that honesty is best,
easiest, most comfortable. And honesty means
not just truth telling in words, but being inside out
authentic.

Too Far

Only those willing to risk going too far can find out how far they can go. ~ T.S. Elliot

You ask me to do this
but it's too large, too foreign,
I'm not comfortable there.
You say I'm ready to sponsor?
You've got to be insane. I can't!
You want me to speak?
To lead a workshop, to carry the key...
You ask too much of me I'm sure.

Too much of me...
more than I can do.
But you're not asking
that I be in charge,
that I find it manageable.
You ask me to show up,
to stand up, to surrender...

to surrender and see
just what "I" can do.

Chosen Pain

Much of your pain is self-chosen. It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self. ~ Kahlil Gibran

Who would choose pain?
Certainly my answer is no...
but in 1997 a rotator cuff,
the misery of the injury, the surgery,
the awful triangular torture chamber
I wore for months...and my life veered,
turned toward self-care.
Then falling last year,
ambulance, emergency surgery,
a brace for months, and now
seventeen months later
through the continuing pain
I know I've grown, reached new plains,
understood more what is life,
who I am, what matters to me.
I would not have chosen mental anguish
from decades of diets, years of failure,
mountains of fat. Then I found
recovery rooms, sanity, serenity,
joy I'd never guessed could be.
Should there be more awaiting me,
requiring a trip through pain,
I'll choose that path.

Grabbing Hold of Willingness

When I have the willingness to admit I don't have the willingness, that's when my program works. ~ Jim H

There's praying for willingness,
for willingness to be willing,
for willingness to be willing to be willing...
but one step more is not having willingness
to admit the lack of willingness.
Independence, a strength, a goal
to be grasped, instilled in a child
from the potty training to learners permit...
Dependence, weakness to be shunned,
impotence to be snubbed,
childishness to be grown from.
Yet dependence and willingness,
fealty and obedience —
odious as they may feel —
are the only path with merit
when I give up and crave
the magic of recovery.

Intellectual Healing

My father and his cousin
reminisced some 80 years,
speaking of their Grandpa's mules,
his bass voice, life on the farm.
I scribbled notes,
history from unlikely men.
Then through their tales
I met the man; his life
and mine came to a turn.
 
Faith healing. As calm
as telling of apologies
to mules. Impossible?
These men weren't fools.
And they believed.
They believed.
Specific words, details.
A severed toe attached.
Even a bleeding mule cured —
by telephone, no less.

*ERROR*ERROR*
*DOES NOT COMPUTE*
I believe in healing,
long ago, far away,
but not in my blood.
Not so calm, so sure.
Now I know my thoughts
were flawed,  my God too small.
He can use me and mine
if we but stand aside.

 

Okay

Many people settle for “okay.” ~ Voices of Recovery (Kindle Location 2146).

Had I had okay when I got here,
I've not have come here,
not have sought recovery,
not  have known a lacking.

Had I stopped at okay in the rooms
I'd have been comforted,
felt worthy, assumed I'd reached there
through innate talents, self-worth.

Had I realized how far beyond okay
stood waiting for me, promised to me,
guaranteed if I managed to follow
twelve simple steps, I'd have missed living
which would not have been okay.

No Fixed Plan

“A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.” ~  Lao Tzu

If I were running things,
I'd have a destination,
a plan, an idea of the trip
maybe vague, but at least a clue.
Planning my life, I'd set out goals,
know what would happen,
have an idea how soon.
But I've given up control,
surrendered the wheel.
I'm just along for the trip,
waiting for guidance
from the one with the plan
that I cannot see.

Bidding

Grant me strength, as I go out from here, to do Your bidding. ~ 7th Step Prayer

Do you want employees to do their job
or their employer's bidding?
A master bids, a sovereign, a ruler.
Bidding fits with homage, with tribute,
with adulation – worship.
So negative, so impotent, so feeble...
To whom do you owe that kind of devotion?
To whom do you yield your strength,
your will, your mind, your soul?
Is there a Creator out there
to whom you can plead,
Grant me strength, as I go out from here,
to do Your bidding?

Trusting God

O thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved home and the war's desolation.

Blest with vict'ry and peace, may the Heav'n rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation!
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: "In God is our trust."
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave! ~ Frances Scott Key

I can't understand God,
know how he manages
my life, much less a universe
of two. I can't do more than listen,
follow, and repeat. But I know
my penchant for independence
stands me in poor stead,
that reliance on God, dependence,
works best for me and all around.

Chocolate's Power

The answer for me is never chocolate.
I know, for I applied it liberally
more than half-a-hundred years,
it failing to deliver one iota of comfort
of any lasting sense, as some lalent legacy.
Instead I learned how miserably
the drastically altered little bean
can harm me, numb me, isolate me,
discomfit me, engorge me, sicken me.
Through it all despite my sufferance
one richly worthy lesson stands preeminent:
Whatever the question or issue may be
I can without a thought or passing glance
rule out chocolate as contributing
a shred to the proper resolution.

Alien

“Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.” This, to me, was the true “action” Step. It required asking the power outside of myself to change me, to make me something alien to myself. ~ Voices of Recovery (Kindle Locations 2084-2087).

Something alien to myself,
beyond any semblance of comfort,
foreign – speaking language
I not only don't know
but never heard, I'm sure...
If I'm turning it over, letting go,
the old familiar is enemy, is wrong,
is anathema. The unknown,
uncomfortable, unearthly is right.
Something not from me,
never of me, seemingly incompatible
my only hope of peace, of harmony,|
of wholeness, of humanity.
My role is only willingness,
release, surrender, deference
to the power that can make me whole
and blend the alien with my essence.

Outwardly Pious, Inwardly Stubborn

Outwardly pious, inwardly stubborn. We appear righteous when we obey enough cultural traditions and verbally reject cultural taboos. ~ Jo Helen Cox

We follow the rules
until they rule us,
become monarchs
with a life of their own
and stand in the stead of God.
We come to believe ritual
stands holy, needing no source,
no basis, no anchor nor harbor.
We forget to remember the truth,
the good, the grace once honored
by rules, once having meaning,
contributing to understanding,
to renewal, to life. We worship the rules
and neglect the sacred, leaving it
neglected, forgotten, ignored.