Between The Worlds

It's Saturday Morning...There's a storm brewing out over the ocean, gray sky, wind chop on the water. I hear the kids playing in the living room and I'm sitting here looking at the screen wondering what's next.

For the last 10 years I've lived in varying degrees of proximity to the recovery world and the whole business scene of recovery. I remember when I went to Twelve Step meetings a lot, the first 5 or 6 years, that there was a reference to recovery not being a religion or even like a religion. A lot of people seemed to get some relief from that idea.

Now after 10 years of being in and around the whole scene I gotta say there's way more similarity between recovery and religion than first meets the eye. They are both organized to be of support for people and both have become institutions that you'd better know the rules both spoken and especially unspoken or you'll be a fringe member at best. What I see is that we, people, have used both as a parking lot for our personal responsibilities. If I join your church then your version of God will be on my side or even my Saviour, but of course the deal is completely conditional on my agreeing with the official version of who and what you say God is etc...In the recovery biz there's the same conditional, meet the panel of judges, criteria if you want to be a full fledged member of the not church. In both cases I'm supposed to go along because that will keep me safe from...me, I guess.

Living afraid of me was a big part of my problem though. I am me and that's all I am so how might I learn to trust me, I am. So, the idea that we have to be all in or all out, that we are either for something or we have to be against it, is another aspect of the same way of thinking that feeds so many of our problems today, both personal and global.

There is a space between these worlds of demanding that I participate on their terms or I can't play at all, and making everything that I don't like wrong. There is a space between feeling and my reactions, between my thoughts and my opinions, between the light and the dark, good and bad, right and wrong, up and down........There is a space between.....everything.

If I give my faith to the church or recovery or anything else, that still does not make the church or recovery responsible for the life I live or the space I'm in with my life. If I'm not comfortable where I'm at, then I leave or at least turn to myself for the why am I not comfortable here. The not comfortable is in Me not in the place I'm at.

Recently living here in Mexico, my wife and I had as profound an experience of something that sets me totally off on attack mode as I can get. This involved kids at my daughter’s school that were acting out symptoms of being physically or even sexually abused. When we spoke out about the situation there was a reaction that, first ,we must be wrong because the topic is too creepy to deal with, then it was openly discussed with the teachers and some of the parents and there was, as I'd expect, an amazing range of responses, from the behavior of the children was normal, to there's something really not okay here, to, but this is "our" little ex-patriot community and we're all friends so we don't want anyone to get upset....What the fuck, these are 5 year old kids and the situation was not good. Well, my wife and I decided to take our daughter out of the school and cut loose from the group of people who were more invested in their Something Else's than in the children's well being.

Now the point is that we both found ourselves feeling creepy toward the whole scene in our little Pueblo. The creepy was a feeling we had in us about the situation, that feeling was not something the village was doing to us, in fact there were only 6 or 8 people involved in the mess at school. We could pack and leave and never see that we were living our own reaction or we can stay put and sort this out.

The truth was, that what was happening was the truth, and we were outside the set of agreements that the people involved at the school, parents and teachers, had been operating from, so our interjections created an issue that they didn't really want to deal with. As it turned out, several people admitted that they knew something was not okay but hadn't known how to address it. We became the bearers of bad news for the adults and good news for the children. Now it's our, my wife and me, our opportunity to allow that space between the worlds to show us how we can stay true to our integrity and not let our reactions make the next choice for us.

We both Love so much of our world here in Mexico and we are not from here, so when we get uncomfortable we are learning to really rely on our self and each other in a whole new way. All the while we are both clear that we are first responsible for our self then our children and then each other. We are living between the worlds of home U.S.A. and choice Sayulita, Mexico just as we live between the worlds of separate, individual and married, together, parents. There is a space between the two and in that space is who we really are, where we really are, living life, the best we have to offer, one day at a time.