Hope

I have learned that it is not a great idea to move during the final week of a class.  I am not done moving.  I am behind on my homework.  I’m tired.

Class got out at 7:40, which meant that I could make it to my favorite meeting.  Behind on everything or no, I have my priorities.  And it was a wonderful meeting about the 2nd step.  The thing about 2nd step meetings generally is that they devolve into 3rd step meetings.  Very few people are able to talk about the second step without talking about the third, even focusing on the third.  Like I said, though, this is my favorite meeting and the people there, with minor exceptions, did share their experience with the second step.

Most people going through the 12 steps come in to the program and do some sort of specific work with their sponsor around the second step, something that helps build hope and that helps the sponsor understand if one is really prepared to do the work they need to do to change.  My own experience is that the 2nd step happened rather unconsciously and all at once.  It wasn’t until quite awhile afterward that I could even see it for what it was or to understand it’s meaning.

Good stories always have a climax, or a turning point, and in that regard mine is no different.  That December night, under the street lamp, when no mental defense against the truth about my condition had any real effect, I could have done what so many do and gone “on to the bitter end, attempting to blot out the consciousness of my intolerable condition.”  That would have been how most stories of addicts and alcoholics end.

It is not how stories of recovery end, though, and whether it happens slowly, as a growing awareness that leads one to decisive action, which is the usual path for most who recover, or it happens all at once, as it happened to me that dark night, something greater becomes operative in our stories.  Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t know how I’ve never happened on this verse before.  I’m not a huge Millay fan.  That probably has something to do with it.  I heard a recording of her reading her own work one time and I couldn’t stand her voice.  Plus I thought the poem was stupid.  But this one, Fig Two, is even more vivid to me, as a commentary on a way of being, than it’s better known companion, Fig One (My candle burns at both ends.)

Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand:
Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand! Read the rest of this entry »

I was reading this post over at myOutSpirit.com about an article in the September issue of Out Magazine which considers how online cruising has changed gay urban social life by, for example, driving human interactions from physical spaces to virtual ones and encouraging the “pornification” of gay self-expression. The Out article is appropriately titled, “Has Manhunt Destroyed Gay Culture?”

“The most powerful secrets we keep on Manhunt aren’t the ones we keep from the outside world. The most powerful secrets on Manhunt are the ones we keep from ourselves. Practically every gay man has his own version of this secret, which we learned to keep while growing up in the closet: the secret fear that, if we were truly known, we would never be loved. Read the rest of this entry »