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 haven’t felt the urge to post here in almost a month. I have been writing, nevertheless, focused on working the Secular Twelve Steps with my sponsor. I’ve also been regularly attending peer-support meetings, getting out of my cocoon and rejoining the human race. The purpose of this post is to talk about how I […]
Magical thinking is harmless unless it becomes a liability. Dreaming of meeting that special person gives me hope, but imagining the person I just met at the coffee shop is my soulmate because she likes the same obscure bands as me is problematic. Yes, it means I met someone with whom I share an interest. […]
I’ve been writing notes on two topics, security and identity, and I just realized that, together, they are actually one topic. For me, at least. I was always looking for someone else to provide me with security. I’ve never been willing to provide security for myself, even in sobriety. My relationship with security makes up […]
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 […]
Love yourself, they say. But what if we haven’t a clue about healthy love actually is? On top of that, ask any ten people to define love and you’ll get ten different responses back. Love is a lot like ‘spirituality’: when we try to define love, we don’t find its limits but instead our own. […]
While visiting Peggy’s Cove on a mild spring day, prepared to take some shots of the lighthouse and the rocky shoreline, I noticed that the sun was melting the ice that had settled in the pools along the rocks. I decided to change lenses, popped in my macro, and took some hand-held details of the […]
“When we attempt to ‘define’ spirituality, we discover not its limits, but our own.” ~ Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketchum, The Spirituality of Imperfection. Religion concerns itself with boundaries: belief against unbelief, insiders against outsiders, church and state, etc. If I try to define spirituality, I can refer only to my own incompleteness and am […]
“Spirituality is a lot like health, we may have good health or poor health, but it’s something we can’t avoid having. The same is true for spirituality: every human being is a spiritual being. The question is not whether we ‘have spirituality’ but whether the spirituality we have is a negative one that leads to […]
The Peace of Wild Things 
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