some poems by my students

Bobcats
Eat
Growl
Run
They like rabbits
by Emily age 5


Sunshine
She is cute.
I feel happy when she smiles at me.
And kisses me.
She licks me.
by Olivia age 5


Cheetos
I eat Cheetos.
They make me so happy.
They taste so good.
They are orange and cheesy.
by Ryan age 5




Hamster
Some can be yellow
And some can be grey
And white and black.
They're cuddly
And cute.
Hamsters
by Mia age 6




Kitten
Orange and white
Cute
It sleeps with me
Eats with me
Jumps on me
Purr
by Gianna age 6




Mermaid
Rainbow mermaid
Baby mermaid
Swimming in the baby pool.
Playing with the mermaid toys.
Making lots of baby noise.
By Killeen age 6




King Cobra Snakes
I like 'em because
they put out their
hoods.
I like 'em because they try to get ya.
They live in trees and under logs
I like when they slide
I'd like to be a King Cobra.
by Devin age 6


Snakes
They live on trees.
They crawl
They sleep
They live in trees
They creep
They eat.
by Nathan age 5




My Dog
I love Sergent.
I play with Sergent.
I feed him.
I sleep with him.
He misses me.
I miss him.
by Madison age 5




My Dog I Like To Play With
Cinnamon my dog
I like to play outside with my dog.
We run.
We catch.
We chase.
We play.
by Maura age 5

Kathleen

One of my dearest friends in all the world was diagnosed with leukemia this week. I am very sad. She is so dear to me and this is not her first bought with cancer. She has held my hand and held me up with her heart and her words over these very difficult past months. I want to help her too. And right now there is nothing I can do but pray, send her healing energy, send her my love. This is Pittsburgh and despite what the displaced out of towners have to say about it we got hospitals like there is no tomorrow and a fabulous cancer center. She was put right into the hospital and treatment was started right away.
That gives me some hope. But it does nothing for the heaviness of my heart. Despite a world renouned cancer center not everyone lives. I know this from heartbroken experience.
I jsut want one of the survivours to be Kathleen. It's selfish, I know. But I still want it.
Not that I wnat her to suffer. No. If she wants to go then she has my blessing. But I hope she wants to stay. Right now she is not seeing anyone. Not reading emails, not taking phone calls. Hopefully soon there will be other ways I can show my love.

Brigid Poetry Slam

This path
I walk this path alone
A runner in a race
My ears deaf to voices
Supporters on the sidelines
Alone
If I reach
I touch you
Voices
Silence
Walking
Mired in the past
I walk
Swamps
Thorns
Rocks
Wild rivers
Steep mountains
Wearing boots
Carrying rope
I can swim
Solid ground is the present
Walking
Seeing
Being
Touching
Feeling
This path
Fellow travelers
Meet
Share
Shining vistas
Thick woods
Flowering meadows
Tangled swamps
Sacred wells of healing and comfort
This path
I walk alone

Brigid Poetry Slam

Once
There was innocence and fearlessness
Then
There was abandonment and denial
And anger and pain
Always there was courage
I walked the edge of the blade
If I fall...death
Arms out!
Careful, careful
Falling
Falling
Falling
Alice-like my fall was not empty sapce
As I fell I bumped into pain
Old hurts shattered me like crystal
Teardrops splintered from me
Fractured, broken, open
I did not fear the landing
I thought I would fall forever
My tears spread below
A lake of feathers
Cushioning impact with compassion
Softening
What had once been hard and brittle

Brigid Poetry Slam

I walked the light in darkness
Broken open
By the light
By love

writing and talking

So, why do I do this? Well, it helps. It helps me to sort out the flotsam and jetsam in my brain. It helps me to recognise my feelings. Now that I have a few more rather than just anger and indifference. Like longhand writing, typing loosenes something.
Plus, I like the clicking. And I like playing with the colours of the words.

When things are really hard I can't talk or write about them well or skillfully but I do it anyway. Because it is like laying out the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and turning them all over. I get the edges and then I can work on the body.

I had an icident at work yesterday. One of my teachers was crying at my desk when I came in. I asked her what was going on. She had gotten an awful email from her mentally ill mother who is on medication for her mental illness and drinking on top of that. The letter said that her mother did not want to talk to any of her children or get emails from them or talk to them on the phone. It went on for five pages of closely typed attack. and she threatened suicide. This girl knows that she can alert the authorities in her mother's town to that. That was not the issue. The issue was one of repeated abandonment paired with the occaisional presence of a caring parent. Which one will we get today? I know that story. From both my parents. I had the opportunity to share some of my experiences with her and to reassure her that she is not responsible for her mother's choices. they are not a reflection on her.
And another problem we have been having at school was peeled a bit when the teacher said that seh sees her mother in another teacher that she does not get along with. Yes, oh yes. People and events in the present that cause us (me) to overreact are not usually about the present. Sometimes they are triggers for painful experiences from the past that I could not react to at the time. It was not safe. Now it is safe but the situation does not warrent such a strong reaction. That, for me, is a huge clue that the present is pulling on threads from the past.
When we talked and shared what it was like for us it opens a door to trust and compassion.

casting spells

I own a pair of skis with boots and poles so small that only the three year olds and some tiny four year olds can fit in the boots. I also own adult skis, poles, and boots. I have not skied in a while.
But a year or so ago my dad gave me a steamer trunk of my grandparents and inside were my skis from long ago. I took them out, looked at them and put them in a corner of a little used room. And there they stayed. Then, earlier this week one of my students began talking excitedly of an upcoming ski trip with her mother. She asked me if I had ever been to Seven Springs. So I told her that I had, indeed, and to several other ski lodges in the area and we went to Canada for two weeks every winter. Everyone says how lucky I was. Yes, in some ways I was. I had skis and all the appropriate clothing to go skiing in Canada. -30 F and they don't factor in the wind chill. One day the wind was blowing so hard the chairs were blowing sideways. But they did not cancel ski school. No. We duck walked up the hill! But I did have fun. I liked ski school. What caused me problems was skiing with my parents. Mum had her issues but was easier to ski with. But too into what I was doing wrong. Dad was a horror. Screaming, leaving me in the snow if I fell, leaving me to be scooped up by a complete stranger and put on the chair lift. Leaving me to be pulled out of a snowbank by someone else's dad. He had rules. No going in before lunch no matter what, kids carry their own skis and boots, No crying, and his children were destined for the winter olympics. (in HIS mind anyway). How do I explain the bad mojo that was on those baby skis and on the big ones? Once when my mother commented that I looked like a professional skier in a race in Canada my dad proceeded to list all the things I had done wrong. I was 10.
Skiing with my dad was not a good experience. but he always thought it was a great way to bond with us. We weren't bonding, we were watching him closely to see if he was going to explode or hit us or storm off and leave us. Yeah, yeah, we were paying attention. (Cause not paying attention got a swift smack.) But bonding, not really.
But I told the kids I had little skis and they wanted to see them. So I brought them in to school. I teach in a really cool school. I discovered that the boots were too small for all but the littlest kids. (I had to wear four pair of socks to make them fit when I first got them.) I also discovered that it is really hard to gets kids feet into ski boots. But we got them on three brave little souls. We went outside to the playground and skied on a gentle little slope. They had fun. Even the kids who were too big for the skis had fun helping the little ones. When they got their skis crossed I picked them up so they could straighten out their skis. (I learned that kick up one ski trick quite young cause my dad had a no helping rule). When they fell I picked them up. If they were scared I held them up. When they were done I took off the skis. When they were cold and had snow in their jackets we went inside. I told them how brave they were. We stopped when it was not fun anymore.
I cast a new spell on a pair of old blue skis. A spell of fun and respect and love.
With the help of some awesome little kids.

And I had a sort of interesting insight this morning. I was reading my
morning readings and one of them triggered me to reflect on what I felt
like a month ago, nine months ago, in the middle of those months. And it
struck me just how bad it was. Not that I didn't know that when I was
there, but from the place I am now I am rather surprised at how well I
managed. I really was suicidal, I really was depressed, I really wanted
to make it all go away. I can't say I really wanted to drink but that
was one way that I knew I could get a kind of relief. (temporary and
with it's own kind of hell) But I was seriously looking for chemical
relief. I am so glad the liver damage was already in my file. I think
it would have been a longer process if it had been easier.
I was vulnerable and felt unsafe, I felt like I was lost and broken in a
foreign land. I felt threatened and unsteady. And I was not only not
sure there was any support for me anywhere, I was sure that whatever
entity that could provide support would refuse. I looked at many things
about myself that I have been looking away from all my life. To the
point that when I could have looked at them I was so good at not seeing
them I still couldn't look at them. Until last summer and fall. I really
think that if I had not allowed myself to just walk through that and see
it and feel the pain I had repressed my whole life it would have done far
more damage than the actual event or the seeing of them.
Not that there are no more of those experiences. There may be. I had
one while telling Lisa about the grandmother. But since there was no
wall up I saw the look on her face and processed , on the spot. Oh, this
is one of those things that we pretend is normal in my family but is
really traumatic and horrible. Oh. So, nothing exploded and I was able
to see how sad and traumatic that was for my grandmother and some of the
consequences it had for her family and for me through my mother. Without
having to work through all the processes of repression that hampered me
before. That was done.

I am really glad that I allowed myself to walk through a really difficult
place even though I thought I might be there a really, really long time.
(Like forever)
Because whatever work may come, I have not only the experience of having
done that but I learned some stuff about myself, and my family that let
the process move more smoothly and not take nine months.
And I learned about how to comfort myself. That was a concept that I had
not even understood to be possible. Bob explained it to me like I was a
small, mentally retarded child. And in that way, I was. I can see him,
very slowly explaining what *sensory* meant.
I don't know if I expressed that well, but I was struck with a huge sense
of gratitude for the experience and the things I learned and that it is
not like that now. And really amazed that I DID that! Like one of the
kids.
And I also think that I picked up some loose threads of my sobriety along
the way. I think I suspected they were there but they were not visible.

triggered trauma

I had an experience at a meeting yesterday where something that was read triggered childhood abuse trauma issues. and then it was made more intense by soemthing that was siand at breakfast afterward. It took me the rest of yesterday and today to figure out what had happened there.
It was something about someone's Higher Power using pain to *get their attention*. Yeah, see I'm working through people and powers that I trust NOT using pain to get mya ttetion because that is abusive.
Pain as a natural event because something hurts or because my actions cause me pain as a consequence of some unskillful choice I have made is different than the smack upside the head that I pictured.
I thought I needed to do an inventory to figure out what I had done wrong. No. I needed to inventory my reaction and see what the root of it was. I can have a painful reaction to something that has little basis in the present situation but deep roots in painful shildhood trauma. I helps that I can do this in days and not weeks or months now. Nice.

Look. Don't look away

Did I mention that after the experience with my former sponsor I began *taking everyone's inventory* in an even worse fashion that I had before.
When I did this and shared it with the priestess I asked for initiation she decided that it called for some work to be done.
Who'd a thought that a few simple questions would have caused such shattering?
Well, first I just said, *no. I can't see that at all. No.* But I tried. And the shattering was in the trying. My safety, my defenses fell apart. Not a comfortable place to be...no safe place.
It set in motion events that I never expected.
It caused me to either look at events in my life that I had repressed for decades. And to look at the skills by which I kept that going.
Childhood abuse, molestation, and the lies that were told to me to keep the truth away. And lies I told myself to keep the truth away.
If I had not been there and done that I would not have thought I could even go there.
I'm still amazed that I walked through that sober, and arrived on the other side of some difficult shit possibly saner that before. Definitely more aware than ever before.
I am a more compassionate person than I was last May. Last May I was far more likely to judge others ad find them wanting than to be able to allow that there may be things in other people's lives that I have no idea about.
See, I had rules I had to live by and I had to make you live by them too. Otherwise my world would shatter.
It is better shattered. I'd rather not do that anytime soon but if it needs doing I would jsut as soon walk through it than not.
You see, it was killing me to keep all that repressed. My body never forgot and so it kept trying to remind me, get me to pay attention. But I didn't know how.
I don't know if that made a lot of sense but as I have found, it will. Eventually, I come to a place where I can express myself and be understood.
See, that was one of the most difficult things about the past nine months. I kept trying to explain to people what was wrong (cause when I could not stop crying people who cared asked me what was wrong) and for months I was just not able to explain in a way that was understood. And then, people were put into my life who understood what I was saying without a lot of explanation.

Why the lapse of over a year in postings?

Well, last winter I had the experience of my sponsor being on pain killers, several, for many months. I had the experience of being lied to by someone I trusted and then being betrayed as the relationship exploded. This in itself was traumatic. And caused a lot of pain and confusion. And anger. Real, righteous, and transfered.
I was called on my anger and tried to stop behaving in the way that I was behaving. Okay. That had some unexpected results. Because I was using anger as a shield against pretty much everything. But I did not recognise it as anger. Because in my life experience anger only looked like throwing things and punching walls and screaming with popping veins. Anger did not look like taking someone else's inventory, being judgemental, or being depressed to the point of suicidal thoughts. So when I stopped acting out on my anger I turned it on myself. My behaviour spiraled down to being exactly as it was before I gort sober except that I was still sober. That was a hellish experience. Living with all the pain that caused me to drink in the first place and not actually drinking. And not having names for any of the things that were painful. All I knew was anger or indifference. And I could not find a way to be indifferent about my own pain.

And the causes were buried so deep that it took months of pain to get them bubbled to the surface. I went back into therapy which helped some but really just pulled a lot of stuff up and then left me struggling for a week to live with what had been brought to the surface. It turns out that I should have been calling the crisi line but I had no reference for what a crisis looked like. It had never been okay before to even experience these feelings. That they were of crisis proportions was not something I could grasp. All I knew was that I was in a lot of pain. I asked for help, did what I knew to do, cried, prayed, complained. Things moved slowly. I had to be told that it wasn't as bad as it had been. Which was true. I felt like the Goddess had allowed me to be put in that place and was somehow twistedly amused by the situation. It took a lot of ranting to her to work through that.
Huh. I was even transfereing my abuse issues to the Divine. I truly felt cast adrift by all.
During this time I had more sponsors than I have had during the whole of 20 years sober. In a 3-4 month span. Which only added to the feeling of being abandoned. Eventually, I found a sponsor whom I still have 3-4 months now. Not that that was a rosy relationship at first. I was clingy. Cause I felt abandoned while dealing with actual abandonment issues that I'd never looked at or seen before. And my new sponsor would not allow clingyness. Which was a good thing truth be told. The old sponsor relationship had been far too codependent and the relationship with the rest of her sponsees debilitating.
Becasue when I told her I was getting another sponsor and that I was concerned about her use of painkillers none of her other sponsees would talk to me and they had been the only people I'd been talking to for some years. Not a good place to be. I thought I had two choices. Whcih turn out to be one really. Drink or die.
I did neither. I put one foot in front of the other every day and walked my path consciously aware of my pain. And slowly, slowly things began to change. I have had two really good positive weeks now. The longest stretch since May. Might not last but I'll have these good days to remember if/when it gets painful again.
Oh, and I'm doing this without medication since my liver will not support the use of such drugs day after day. My therapist was a little dismayed by that. But he's dealing with it.
I have the support of so many people. People who call each other and to tell them I might need to talk, who talk to me when I call, who listen to me cry and don't need to hear what I'm saying through my tears. They can just be there on the other end of the phone, in the next chair, with a hug or an encouraging word. Or the frustration of someone who is afraid for me because they can see my pain.
And even the Goddess who may not grant me my wishes but does help me find the strength to do the things I do not think I can do.

reality

I have spent my life trying to escape reality in one from or another. I have recently discovered that it is actually more porductive to meet reality, however painful, deal with it and move on.

That being said, the painful issues that I have faced in the last eight months have not moved quickly from my perspective. But still, they have moved and this is better than running from them or fighting them. NOT move comfortable. NOT easier. But the better choice.

Addiction is fatal. Really. It's not just messy or unmanageable. It doesn't just get us into trouble. It is fatal. I've already been to too many funerals. My beloved dead are already too numerous. I'm just not that old. I do not want to add to their ranks. I do not want this disease to take more of the people I love because they think they can't face the pain. Unfortunately, the choice is not mine.

I only get to work with the people who ask. Not the people who need.

new

Oops. I missed yesterday.
Try again.
I have a new sponsee. She is just back from a slip. Seems like a LOT of people went out over the Holidays. People with a little time to people with decades of sobriety. Very disturbing. And sad. I have one friend who jsut went out this week. She had just gotten out of jail on a DUI charge. She nearly died not too long ago from her last relapse. This leaves me with a sense of forboding. And deep grief.

Please Goddess look after her. And please gift me a Gods' tongue when talking to my sponsees that I may say what they need to hear. It isn't my *skill* that will keep anyone sober. It's just a gift. Sobriety, that is. There are tools that help and practises that make it more likely but it is still a gift. sorta like ya can't win the lottery if ya don't buy a ticket.
I guess that makes it sound like chance. Why do some people make it and some not? I wish I knew.

let's try this again

I'm back again. After an absence of more than a year. During that time my life exploded. I intend to write more on that in the days to come...even if I write only one sentence a day. It was horrible and wonderful. I have the best of intentions and, let's see, I've already been to hell. Bought the t-shirt. So we'll see where this road leads.