We have this house, not a home anymore. Putting it on the market. When will it sell, who knows? You’ve already gone. I, still here, stuck in a time that is past.

It will sell and then the vestiges of a past life will fall away. I am done in the past and am looking forward to the future with trepidation and excitement. Not long ago I couldn’t see a future. It’s still tenuous. I am used to looking through the lense of fear.

If I take a step forward though I will see things open up. If I stay in one spot I don’t blossom I just wilt further into the back ground.

I don’t have the belief that I am a flower that can blossom or that any one will want to smell me, but I think that if I look at myself and am humble and tough enough to accept what is there I will realise that God only makes flowers.

If I look closely at life it’s all about coming together and falling apart.

Its hard to see in the dark. What do I have to guide me in a place where I stumble around making bad decisions for myself ? I have this insane pattern where I run into the same old objects, because it is what I know and its getting really old, frustrating and hope draining.

Must I continue to bash myself headlong into pain ? Do I need to put myself in this situation again and again, just because I won’t give something else a chance. I am getting so tired of this fruitless dance that takes me ever closer to the abyss. Was I really put here to thrash around in pain and bewilderment ?

Am I being self indulgent and self absorbed ? Can I see my way through this, or am I to far inside to find my way out of the Dark ?

Am I the Dark ?

There has been Light in my life before and I crave it still. It seems so far away. Was it just an illusion that I had, or was it real ? I lived it, I loved it. There has to be a way there again. It must have been not quite solid if I find my self back in the Dark.

What is the most worrying to me is the quality of my Faith. If I truly had a solid Faith in others I wouldn’t be where I am. I would feel that I have what I need, instead of this feeling of emptiness that it is sex that makes me whole. Not even my own, but watching others to try and fill that hole that I know is a illusion, but that I put so much belief in.

They are going to make me question them and myself, as I will do

I am walking on the trail. There is a river frozen in me and by my side. I bend my head for the branch’s that brush my toque. I sink into the sound of crunching snow, friction on the wires of my earbuds and a song rolling through my emotions. I have my eyes focused on the stark, yet hopeful black shadows that the trees cut into the sky.

A large Raven sits at the top of a denuded birch. Its outline cutting through the evening light. As I walk closer to the tree it is perched on I realise that it is watching me with a rapt gaze. My head tilts as I pass by the birch and I turn back to see it gliding down to swoop in on my chest. I stand in shock and awe as it reaches into my chest with its beak and lifts out my heart on a chain.

I fall back into the snow as it flaps up into the sky. It takes a tour of the stars and I see this all as it makes its way through the black/blue of the crystal clear evening sky. I feel the constellations in my beating heart and the warmth of a billion stars floods into it as Raven takes my Love to new and all encompassing heights.

What is this journey of rapture compared with my earthly presence, I wonder ? Then I see the Raven descending to drop my heart back into place. It croaks and I hear “We all have this Light inside, it is just finding it through the way that we live and what we allow into our selves. Allow the world to come and roost in you. You will want no longer”.

I get to my feet and walk on as I flow into the one reality. I am the world and It is me.

What have I become ? Look at the tracks on my soul. They are a record of what I have welcomed and endured to be in this place. there wasn’t a lot of engagement in the rest of my life, but now I am trying to change that and be in life, not on the sidelines. When you haven’t done that before there are frequent missteps and painful blunders, but I continue to get better at reading people and situations and lo and behold I am proud of what I do at times.

I am more sure of myself and if I let myself be, I can deal with my job and relationships in  the manner of one with the confidence of his convictions and himself. I feel my way now as much as I think it. I used to over analyse every situation and myself. Leaving me in a loop of confusion and fear, never to be able to finish or enjoy anything that I did.

Today I can look back on my day and reflect proudly on the effort that I have put into doing, engaging and achieving. I can stick up for myself, my values, my view and treat others with respect. My recent experience has taught me to be empathetic of others, even if they are reacting in a way that affects me. I have seen the pain that can be behind actions. I have felt the suffering that is behind lashing out at others.

I am trying to find that place where I will reach into my tool bag and not my war chest when facing a situation that is presented to me. When I don’t have to scrape the egg off of myself, or swallow the bitter vial of resentment and fear. Heaven forbid that I have to apologise for actions that I have taken to punish someone who has gotten in my way. Do I really believe that you have the right to be human, just like myself, or am I so wrapped up in my cape of trauma, fear, shame and addiction that you come a distant second ?

Today I can answer that I am learning that my life is engaged with yours on a level more intertwined than I could ever have imagined. I used to say to myself , when I was in the midst of my acting out, chemically, or behaviourally that I was the author of my own tragedy. What I failed to realise was that no person leaves this world without leaving ripples. Do I think that I can live in a stasis field where my actions have no    consequence ?

Today I want to be known as Peter. I will leave a legacy of a full, trying, forgiving and loving person. Not the chameleon that I used to be. I always new just a little bit about what you were talking about. I tried to make that stretch into the full experience of life. What I discounted was myself and all that I am. Without that I can only try to live a facade, not all of me, so much more than I could ever imagine.

I fail to see why I must suffer, but suffer I do. Mainly by my own hand. I am growing i’m told. Fuck that.

I stand in the dark and crave more dark. Why is that ? I held the Light in my mind, at one time. It lit my way towards others and I saw my meaning was Love. I refuse to believe that is not so. Am I just not doing it right ?

Do I need to rush in to hold you by the hand to actualise my Love ? Do I need to carry you through the fire and mud ? Can I step back and watch it come to me ? Do I need to let you carry me ? The grief is gone and I no longer have that to warm me and carry me through the night.The hate has waned and also fizzles when I try to stand within its terrible glow.

I need you, but it seems we are to preoccupied with our own brightly burning bush’s, or the ash’s that lay at our feet. Writing this gives me something to hold onto and do I need something to hold.

There is no beginning or end to life. I am here in it and I am going to have to turn around and face myself. This begs the question. Do I do it now when I can make use of the pen, my strongest asset. Or do I continue to deny my humanity and escape back into the dark, terrible, suffering, again.

I may halt and stumble but I can’t watch that Light of Love fade anymore. I stand before you with my words. That’s all I can see my way through now. If they touch you come and we can use them to make our way forward.

I look in the mirror and see a hunched over, naked man. For the life of me I can’t see myself. I see a man with a frantic, obsessed look on his sweaty face, his body contorted as he masturbates in front of a screen, trying to find what ?

I don’t even know anymore. What is the man in the mirror looking for: pleasure, numbness, control, or some twisted version of revenge. Trying to find love in hate ? The man sits there manufacturing a state of insanity where the pictures make a pseudo life that he can move into for awhile.

The sad reality is that he is looking to save me. He is desperately trying to keep me afloat, because there is something missing. Is this broken, angry, fearful and yearning man my addiction ? Looking in the mirror I see me. I am that addiction. I am so much more. I am the man who went a far way to get better, came back for  sober years and let it slip back into that dark morass of acting out. I used to see the light everywhere and I still see it today, but it is harder to get myself to look.

I am going to hold that man in the mirror and tell him that he doesn’t have to do that anymore. I hope he believes me. Just a little. I don’t have much time left.

I dream today that I will be in a stable relationship. I dream that I will be a writer that people respect and treasure for his insights into the human condition. I dream.

For the life of me I can’t remember dreaming as a child. Not the dreams of being a hero, fireman, police officer, or a carpenter like my Father. I immersed myself in books about science fiction. You see, they provided me with the escape that I needed. A place far away that had nothing to do with the place that I was.

I guess the difference is that I didn’t dream towards something, I dreamed away from what was.

I don’t dream outward to distant galaxy’s these days. I dream into the enigma that is me. A much larger, more terrifying and splendid expanse than I could have ever dreamed of seeing.

I still have a fondness for Star Trek, but I realise that the true adventure every day is to go on the journey that is me and for that I dream.

I am out for a walk. Its about 12 below. My boots crunch and slide through the churned up snow that’s laying on the unplowed side street. I look up and see the lifeless shell of the old Drum hospital to my left.

I think of the day that I walked into a room in Summerland to watch my Father die. He said ” hello Peter ” and then lapsed into a comatose state. We sat at his bedside for 8 days as he died.

My Mother and I talked and cried or lapsed into silence for many minutes. We sat like this at his bedside for those interminable days. My brother and sister arrived at various points and we brought in extra chairs to accommodate them.

Through all that time the one constant was touch. When we were there we all at some point or another were touching parts of his body. He didn’t acknowledge it or seem to be aware of it.

What was in that touch I ask myself ? Was I finally after all these years trying to connect with a man I really knew little about ? Was there fear that he was dying, and that fear a reminder of my own mortality ? Was there the thought that I could bring some level of hope to his journey and transmit that he was not alone ? Was there obligation ? Did my touch also contain condemnation for all that I perceived that he had or had not given   me ?

I think of other areas in my life where I touch others. 12 step meetings, work and generally. Do I hug people to support, possess, restrain them or connect ? Do I do it to affirm that I am alive. Sometimes I feel insubstantial and need the comfort of knowing that I am real. I also touch to communicate things to you. I am here. I support you. I am aroused by you.

I touch my self also. I do it in exploratory, loving, hopeful and abusive of ways. Would I treat my best friend the way that I abuse my own body ? I don’t know, there are times that my perceived need for control and fear make that a possibility. Part of the touch that I do is to feed myself, which can be very nurturing or abusive as well.

I am watching a snow squall through the window and wondering how the flakes will feel on my face when I step out into it. When I walk I often stop to put my arms around a tree and feel its rough texture against my cheek. What can its touch tell me ? What can your touch say to me ? The possibility’s are endless. I sit here with my head in my hands, overwhelmed by the physical, emotional, financial, an spiritual effects of touch.

Don’t stop though. If we keep doing it we are bound to find some of the answers and the healthy touch feels good to me. I hope you also feel that.

I am standing here, in the light, with the loneliness lapping at my ankles. The fear of drowning in my addiction having subsided somewhat. The fear of it rising again push’s me to reach out and grasp on to what you have.  Yourself.

I have been trying to fight the tide alone for so long that I don’t know any other way. No matter how I ignore it with my various distractions it still creeps in. I have seen bodies floating away on it as I held on to myself in the chilly, suffocating waters of loneliness.

The bodies that I think of, are of my childhood and of my Father, who floated away , in his own ocean of loneliness, even before I was born. Also the bodies of my self respect, my feeling of belonging and worthiness. I am left with nothing to hold onto in this rising tide.

I have to wonder has my life ever had meaning ? I look back and see the bleached bones of the corpse’s of people, things and places that might have been. The bodies sometimes have the flesh of emotion still clinging to them.  Some mornings I wake up and I breathe deeply and don’t catch a whiff, but on others all I breathe in is the cloying odour of decay. Those are the hard days when I try to walk in the world of the living with a nose full of death.

The days when the tide is up to my neck and all I can think is to shut my eyes and take myself away from this place. My obsessive, frantic vacations away from reality into the realm where I negate all that I am for base escape. If I keep it up there will come a time when I just open my mouth and let the tide creep down my throat till I can’t breathe the light of Love anymore and the last flicker in me goes out.

There is a meaning though. It starts with offering to others what I have learned, not through wanting to learn it, but through necessity. I can’t be me without you. I have tried to live a life of self fulfilment through my own means and it is a contradiction in terms. The only way I can truly keep the tide at bay is to hold you in my arms and tell you I love you till you can believe it yourself and if you already believe it please, please, please hold me.

I am standing here in the light with the tide lapping at my ankles and I am going to start walking along the beach where I  see you standing and together perhaps we can keep each other from running like lemmings into the ocean of loneliness.

Why don’t we sit down, make a fire, no matter how it sputters and talk. I am sure as we feed the fire it will grow and warm us. Soon the memory of that dark chill from the tide will leave us and we can breathe. Sitting in the light of Love.

I walk down  the street, past a church. There is a bench, coloured like a rainbow, and on it sits a man. Its winter, not to cold, so the man is dressed in a light jacket, hat and gloves.

He sits there with eyes that have turned inwards in a spotlight gaze on his soul, or so I imagine. Does it really help to look so deep, I wonder ? I have been the same at times, searching the barren, litter strewn past to find the answers that will give me a clean slate to work with on my journey.

I have discovered, to my chagrin, that it can be damaging to do this, to wallow in the past, to let my grief swallow me and lead me to the only comfort that I know. It behooves me to tear my gaze from the past and into the present so that I don’t miss the wonders going by, before my very soul.

When I cast back to the past it is easy for me to manufacture my reality, to fit my inclinations, as I see fit. When in the present it is harder to twist the situation to construct a world where I can become the victim. It is from that insane place I allow myself to walk, eyes wide open, into the emotional, physical meat grinder of my addiction.

The past may have put me in the state where I have the feeling that that’s all I can                be: fodder. I don’t have to walk into the grinder though. I can make a choice today to look past the dark hole of my addiction and walk into the turbulent light of Recovery.

Then again the man may just be tired and needing a rest from his walking. Who knows ?