I write about recovery from addiction without religion, but spirituality has always been something that has given me great meaning in life. And the meaning of spirituality has changed for me over time. I was raised without any religious belief and was encouraged by loving parents to ‘find my own path’. I visited a couple […]
So this was me, then: I dive into a new interest, be it an activity, hobby, or a person. I mean, I actually dive into. I go in head first, then my torso follows, and not long after my legs and when my feet disappear, I’m gone. Why is it ‘head over heels’? Shouldn’t it […]
My disease wants me identify with thought, write with proper diction, connect thoughts with logic, compare and contrast, bring hierarchy into order. My soul wants me to live from the heart. At one point about ten years ago, my heart was battered and bruised and short of breath. I shut it down. Locked it up […]
When the Twelve Steps were created in the 1930s, the founders didn’t know as much about the disease of alcoholism as we do today. But they understood how alcoholism feels and how it destroys lives. They also found a way to help people recover that has worked for almost 90 years. Back then, alcoholics experienced […]
I’ve always felt this nostalgia as an aching, a loneliness, and as a desire to flee to a place that doesn’t exist. It is a place of my dreams, a community of love and light and joy and peace, living off the land, self-sufficient, and all sacred paths converge there and there are even agnostics […]
I recently came to the realization that, for a good portion of the last few years, I’ve been steadfast in the activity of ‘not-dying’ as opposed to truly ‘living’. In the fall of 2022, I made a decision to not end my life and instead reached out for help. At the time, I had been […]
In my daily meditation reading, the author talks about how addicts avoid uncomfortable feelings through substance use. They reassure the reader that pain, like all things, will pass, and that all feelings must be experienced and not intellectualized. I agree with most of what the author put forward; however, I never avoided feelings when I […]
One of my goals here is to sift through traditional Twelve Step recovery concepts and make the language and ideas more palatable for agnostics, free-thinkers, atheists, and non-believers who, like me, are in recovery from addiction. I also work stuff out in my mind as I write, with my first draft often becoming my published […]
I am sharing what I have learned about my own relapse, a nine-year meandering in the desert that ended last April when I returned to the 12-step program and its peer-support meetings. Over the past five months, I’ve spent many hours in deep deliberation, trying to understand why I left recovery in 2014. It is […]
The Peace of Wild Things 
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