Not your time yet. But when your time does come you will be in good company.
Dave
Friday, October 5, 2012
Dave's Reply
Not your time yet. But when your time does come you will be in good company.
Dave
Wednesday, October 3, 2012
A Note to Dave
Dave ...
While I was in the hospital last week ... (had a full heart block) ... I had this experience ... I was
sitting in my room ... in my bed ... things quietly changed all around me ... There were two distinct but conjoined realities occupying the space around me ...
On the right side of me was a large number of throne
like chairs ... it was very much like the seating arrangements in the Sistine Chapel for the Cardinals.
These seats were set off on a tangent at about 45 degrees to me and disappeared in the distance ...
All the seats were filled with people I knew. Al was sitting there ... my father ... grandparents on others ... Rich M from high school??? lots of people I know ... or knew and all of them had one thing in common ... all were dead ...
None
were looking at me ... they were all looking off to their right or away from me
... they appeared not to be able to notice me ...
On my left side were a large
cluster of very tall beings ... very willowy figures ... all dressed in white ...
white hair ... hair uniformly combed back ... all with elongated faces ... most of their faces did not stand out except for the one individual standing closest to me ...
The one standing closest to me had a large book ... it glowed amber in colour ... it
was open in his hands ... I could not see what was written on the pages ... the book was just a solid mass that was outlined in soft earth colours and the pages seemed to glow amber.
I asked him, "Are you here for me?"
He did not speak out loud, but I could hear his reply in my head.
"No not yet."
Then everything reverted back to a Thursday afternoon in the sunshine of the day.
Best Neil
Saturday, July 14, 2012
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
Extracts From Sheritt A Spy Story Book Two
Sunday 17th Oct 1976, 12:30 pm
Carpentras France, In The Bakery
On La Rue Des Ramparts ...
About 30 Meters Kitty Corner From Le Café
Not Far From The Church
Standing Inside
It wasn’t hard to pick out our man. They all have that look about them. You can spot them at a mile off, if you know what you are looking for. I stood there inside the bakery and watched. He was there airing himself out in the fall sun, smoking his cigarette and waiting as if he had nothing else better to do.
My thoughts just rambled for a few moments. I had not said anything out into the room as of yet, but I did wonder if my lips moved as I thought.
Cleone knew who he was instantly. “That one, sitting right there with the smoke, that’s the bastard ... he’s ... a part of Carlos’ crew.” She paused as we simply looked on. She had a croissant poised to be eaten but it was now a pointer indicating in the direction of le Café. “He and Sánchez have worked together,” there was a slight pause while she gathered her thoughts ... “several times.” She paused again and thought, “Johannes somebody or other, he is on our hit list of people to grab onto. Take him down at all costs!”
She just looked at me. “You know you look and look and look for these people and never see them, and then all of a sudden there they are. Right there within my grasp. Fuck!” This fuck was a short and snappy fuck not a long and drawn out exasperated fuck ... just short and to the point. Something you’d say with your teeth clenched. “Fuck!”
Both Cleone and I knew that this man was a psychopath and would kill simply because it needed to be done.
I recognized Weinrich from his photos but never had I gotten this close to a world class terrorist since that time I came face to face with Ilich Ramírez Sánchez aka Carlos, in the Ottawa airport. At the time I was role playing being an Air Canada supervisor ticket agent. We were looking for Carlos. We suspected that he would be at the airport either coming or going on that particular day. I got to look him straight in the eye, and somehow in that space between me, the counter and the distance to the doorway, he slipped away and made good his escape. That space in time seemed like and eternity but it was only the very briefest of seconds.
Both Sánchez and I knew. We recognized each other for who we were; I a foil and he a perpetrator playing out our parts. That death’s door was simply waiting to be opened. For an instant it was as if both heaven and hell held their breath to see what each of us would do. Either one of us could set madness in motion. We could see it in each other’s eyes. And he knew that I, would not do anything while we were constrained by the configuration of the airport and the crowds contained therein.
He actually smiled at me. Not an ear to ear, but more an ever so slight Mona Liza type smile. He knew that I knew he had me.
There was no need to say anything on either of our behalves.
I got a simple fuck you by eye contact and the smile. That was it.
King Hussein of Jordan was in the nation’s capital and he was Carlos’s intended target. Security was too tight and Sánchez simply slipped away and melted into the crowd. There was a rumor that he had a girl friend who lived somewhere behind the Governor Generals Residence at or near Rock Coté Park, but that was only a rumor. I could still feel those shivers I felt then, right now as my thoughts wandered about in my mind.
Right before my eyes I watched as a world class predator becomes our prey. That gave me a different kind of shutter.
So close yet so far away. My mind came back in focus to the here and now. I noticed a young man in a poorly tailored suit wearing a fedora motion to the waiter. He handed a note and some currency over to him. The waiter nodded and went straight to the table and gave it to Johannes.
Weinrich finished his wine then got up and began to stroll from the café. It was not a hurried walk, but it was a well-rehearsed walk that he walked so he could easily see if anyone was watching. He walked to a dark green two door Citroën parked (in parallel fashion) on the street at the side of the café. He sat in the front seat, lit another cigarette, rolled down the driver’s window and waited to see what was going to happen around him. When he apparently determined that no one was interested in him, he started the car. It rose as Citroën’s do, like a camel getting to its feet. He backed out into the street and lurched ahead into traffic. It was obvious that the clutch had him guessing, thus not his personal car. Just like us, either borrowed or stolen. I smiled.
Max was waiting at the end of the street in Cleone’s blue Peugeot. I clicked twice on the radio and I got one click back. He confirmed that he had the target and was on him. Max had seen all this happen too.
Cleone and I were now traveling in a cream colored Renault sedan with a retractable hand cranked sunroof and a brown leather interior, stolen earlier from a bakery in a little place just outside of Vaison le Romaine. We all went in for coffee and a bun and came away with a coffee, a bun and a car. Not such a bad morning’s work and the baker will not miss it until he goes to leave for home at 3 pm. (You might want to know how I knew it was 3 pm when he would miss his car. I simply asked him, “What time do you usually go home each day?” and he told me while he waited on us at the counter.)
Johannes tossed a crumbled piece of paper from the driver’s window as he rounded the corner at the bottom of the block. Cleone was off like a shot and on it. She was as cat on the hunt and the mouse was that scrap of paper. It is not often that one makes a mistake in this business and lives to see the next day. It could be that Mr. Johannes Weinrich had sealed his fate. I turned and went for the car. Boris was in the back seat and still absorbed in his trashy novel.
It was decided, level playing field or not, that we had to take the initiative and get ahead of this thing before it got us. So we had resolved earlier, over breakfast, that it was better to die trying than it was to die hiding in our fear.
It was game on.
Friday, June 24, 2011
Someone I used to Know K - B's Story
A Story Woven Around The Trials and Tribulations Of Step One: The Hard Part In This Business Is Not Winning, And Sometimes You Can't Win Them All: K-B's Story.
K-B's story is one that evolved over several years for me. I have to tell it in the past tense, mainly, and the reason becomes apparent as you hear her story. Her story comes out of the depths of depression and fear. It clearly expresses just how scary this thing called recovery appears to be.
The key word here is "appears".
For each of us, there is a process of 'Need To's' we have to go through. They are the very nature of life's trials and tribulations. We seem to acquire these trials and tribulations 'Need To's' early on in our existence and experience here, then have the rest of our lives to sort through the various conundrums generated by our early experiences.
Just how we came to have the particular set of 'Need To's' we do is likely to be different for each of us. The truth of the matter is that it really does not matter how we got the list, but it is important to know that each has our own. Some of us can make a great hullabaloo about how we got our list and some of us turn our acquisition process in to damned good stories. But each of us has our own particular story and 'way about things' and that 'way about things' is the script that will lead us to our own personal spiritual awakening. It is a script or curriculum for the soul's growth by the way. Not for the personality or the betterment of our character or to enhance our ability for personal acquisition or gains, and it is definitely not about right or wrong it is just about an opportunity for growth through experience, for the soul; many of us confuse that one.
A single mom K-B, had come to me, me as the therapist and she as a client, had attended several one-on-one-sessions. Just as we were about to get serious about the whole thing when she bolted and quit.
I got some history and that was about all. I knew that she was a member of the recovery movement; she attended Narcotics Anonymous (NA). I knew that she had struggled with being clean and sober. On again and off again. Like so many of us working a recovery program. She was drug addicted and she was attempting to work a program of recovery in "her-own way". "Her-own way" would prove to be the fatal flaw that was her undoing in the end.
She knew she had a problem and that her problem was manifested as drug addiction but it was the "manageability part" she had difficulty with. Step one, part two, sort of. After all, it was the drugs and the using of the drugs that gained the only relief for her from her pain. As I understood her story, she had been done-over many times with various boundary violations and she was not about to allow any of that to happen again, so regardless, she was "In Management".
She ran her own protection racket, because, as she had confided in me, a very deep part of her knew that her life depended upon it. And, pardon the pun, for the 'life of her' she could not let go of the process of protection and survival that the original hurt, hate, pain and fear set into motion and now life and its circumstances seemed to perpetuate. So there she was caught between the rock and a hard place, she could not step into her own recovery and actually get benefit from it for fear of letting the old 'ghosts' catch her unaware and hurting her again. You see, it was the ghosts of that hurt, hate, pain and fear that kept her ever so vigilant and alive or so she thought. Now the delusion of the predicament was that the protection racket that was supposedly keeping her free from the ever-present harm that lurked behind every shadow, was the very thing which would bring about her very demise.
It's like hanging on to the side of the swimming pool, too afraid to let go and take a chance, but wet none the less. All of the consequences and none of the benefits!
You see she had been harmed as a very little girl. She had been assaulted, violated and abused.
She was actually 'infamous' for her rants and raving about those very things at the various recovery meetings she attended.
God Bless her, she was able to get herself clean and sober but, and this is the tragedy, never sane. It was cyclical. Clean and sober but never sane then use drugs for relief. Repeat-Repeat-Repeat. What became apparent for me was that for K-B the underlying issue was the need for healthy understanding of forgiveness, but not forgiving those who did her, not in the classic sense that most understand forgiveness to be . . . "I forgive you for hurting me!" Not that!
You see, what became clear for me early on was that she was working from an inadequate model and understanding of the word forgiveness, and that was her trap. It follows like this: if you think you have to say that it is ok that what happened to you, happened . . . but at the same time in your own mind what happened could never be ok . . . then paradox has step up and it has you in its grip. There is no imaginable way out. (Know this, that there are those things that are classed and judged properly As Never Being Ok To Have Happened To You, Or Anyone Else, But The Did).
So it follows then: how could she or you or anyone else for that matter, forgive and gain the release you seek when you could not see the way out?
Well you can't.
This young lady had no real way out of her hurt and pain that she could either see or sense on her own. Those are the important words, on her own. Her very understanding of what she thought she was trying to do was the very thing that generated more hurt, hate, pain and fear, the one thing she was trying so desperately to escape. And doing it on her own was the cap on the bottle that kept it contained and dangerous.
Here is the working definition of forgiveness:
To be able to release myself from the hurt, hate, pain and fear of my past, to release that energy that I have personally invested in keeping me safe from the ghosts of my own past. Thus from the bondage I created to my past by my own feelings. The ones that are stored up deep down inside me and the ones that keep me stuck to the very persons, places or things (surrogates) that originally set the hurt, hate, fear and pain into motion in the first place.
It has nothing to do with me saying that what happened was ok, or it is now ok that someone else did what he or she did to me or others.
I need to unhook from those deep feelings of hurt, hate, fear and pain and all they represent to me, so I can get on with my life. The one I was born into and more importantly the one God intended me to have.
But for most of us the hurt, hate, fear and pain cycle is like the moth and the flame... we are always circling it and always getting burnt by it, and always wondering why the flame hurts and we are always within its easy grasp. It is as if we are mesmerized by it. It seems to take such a monumental effort to move away from that very thing that brings hurt . . .
My own feelings had become my worst enemy because they had me I did not have them and they had me. They controlled how I reacted and thought, and all of my deeper functions were working as hard as they could to protect me from those feelings that connected me to those people, place, events and memories that I have come to fear most because of my original experience with them. And here is the hard part to grasp, it was all locked inside of me. It was no longer out there trying to get in. It was already inside doing its handy work. Scaring me to death, slowly
It is something like hanging on to the rattlesnake. Once you got him in your grasp at least you know where he is, but again what do you do with him and when do you rest and if you do set him down what will happen to you?
So she now had to live her life adjusting to shadows of her past as she thought she perceived them. A sick cycle of action and reaction that has no end unless the cycle is broken someplace, usually in recovery and often in therapy but always with someone else that you come to learn to trust.
The problem being is that we believe that this process of "using" will actually help because it really does . . . temporally. Key word here is "temporally". Which of course is a perfect neophyte's explanation of addiction and the various processes connected to it.
Many who first come into recovery reach this place, clean, sober and insane. There is a difference between surrender to the greater cause of your own good and recovery, and complying with the various levels of healing in hopes of getting help without making yourself too vulnerable.
Compliance will not gain sanity, only surrender will, but it is so scary for some to imagine surrendering that it is virtually impossible to even consider that it as possible. That does not say it is impossible to do, just impossible to imagine.
K-B was on of those, one of those who were so scared that she could not imagine that it were possible to surrender.
A good working definition of surrender in recovery is working the 12 Steps with a sponsor and following directions given by the sponsor and not making deals and creating short cuts or doing things your own way. In short, doing things your sponsor's way rather then your way.
It basically comes in two parts, first, work the steps and part two is, with a sponsor. An approximate equal measure of both is required before desired results can be expected to happen. Do it their way, not you're way . . . that is the key, and as I said earlier it is too scary for some even to contemplate doing that.
This is about the point where if each of us is paying attention our own personal spiritual 'Need To' agenda, we begin to notice doing something comes into play. "I need to do this", "this has to happen", "I have to make amends", "I need to learn to be responsible", but all this comes after I surrender and begin to work the steps with someone.
But if I can't get past Step One . . . then!
For K-B it was surrender, and it was surrender coupled with a proper understanding and experience with the spiritual meaning of forgiveness. This all this taken over time and processed so that the memories and the ghosts could take their proper place on the shelves of her mind and be let go of.
Know this: that memories in their proper place are not haunting, they are simply what happened and that is all, just what happened.
There were also deeper forces at work here and one was the deeper need to begin the journey of trust with someone else and go with that person a ways on their journey of healing. A shared experience! Sort of walking hand in hand spiritually. With a sponsor!
"With" is the Key word here.
"Sharing" and "trusting" are other key words that go to describe the process that is necessary and a natural spin off of the 12 Steps.
And yes it does seem to matter how we do the 12 steps, i.e., various sources on the 12 Steps point out that not until the steps are done and done in order and done thoroughly will results happen. Now isn't that a fascinating concept when you think about it: do them in order and do them thoroughly that leaves 'my way' out of the process entirely.
In my years in the business of recovery, both as a consumer and as an agent/facilitator, I have found that a deviation from the 'pattern" or road map, even in the interest of saving time, cost me dearly, both in time and emotional energy. And for some, it cost them their lives, literally. K-B is an example.
She came into a treatment pattern and then ducked out before anything real could begin to happen claiming that the dollar cost was too much. About a year and a half after that duck out she received a court settlement from an auto accident that permitted her the opportunity to 'afford' the counseling. She had lost a kneecap in a motorcycle mishap. She called on a Tuesday morning and asked for an appointment, we talked briefly and I had an opening on the upcoming Friday morning at 8:30am and she filled it.
K-B was dead sometime on the intervening Thursday afternoon or early evening. "Od-ed" on heroin. Went down, as they say, like a ton of bricks - was dead before she hit the floor - at home in the shower, with the rig in her arm, a new car, a red Mustang convertible, sitting in the lane. And a 5-year-old little boy, her son, now abandoned to the world, by both his mom and dad, both taken by drug over doses.
K-B had an inkling of the wrongs that had happened to her. She had a powerful sense that something had been laying in wait for her and these hidden demon had been running her life. These things were distant scary ghosts as far as she was concerned, but they formed the fear patterns that drove her life and her addictions.
I attended her funeral. At the funeral I got to see who would, in all probability, have been the focus of her rage. I watched him stand at her graveside and try and sell (I choose my words carefully here), sell the idea to everyone present - well over 100 people - that any one of us would be welcome in his home, if we choose to come, to visit, to see him, after all, we were all friends of the dearly departed and after all we all loved her, didn't we? That he really had nothing to do with her death. That he really had done nothing wrong. Really!
It was both a spontaneous and a pitiful performance. The answer to why he made that pitiful pitch in the midst of the mourners at the graveside lay hidden in the darker reaches of his own mind. Only he knows what motivated him that day. It seemed obvious that as of that moment in time, he had not come to terms with his own demons. The ghosts of his own hurt, hate, pain and fear.
No one said anything. And I am sure no one believed him. The silence was deafening. We simply left him to his own fate. The fate of having to be himself and facing what he needed to face someday, but not that-day, to get on with the process of being who is was supposed to be, as God intended.
To some that may sound cruel but it's not.
Why? Because this thing called recovery is here for him to do too. But only if he chooses it. First, as it is for all of us who choose recovery as a way of life, we have to be prepared to surrender to the greater processes. Then, let go of our ego's agenda and our false-selves, and get honest, really, really honest, not just safely honest, but really, really honest and tell the truth as it really is and not as we would like it to be.
He never asked that day, but if he does, then someone will step forward and offer . . . His choice!
As an aside, it is an interesting fact that may or may not be true but hearsay suggests that 92% of those people in NA were sexually abused as children. It is just one of those things that get bantered about as real. Whether or not, I'm not sure, but I have met many that were. Far too many who were.
K-B was in NA.
A-M, who by the time of the funeral and these occurrences had long since passed out of the formal therapeutic setting, and resided else-where, contacted me when she heard of K-B's death.
The grapevine is quick.
She and K-B had been friends early on in recovery. They came in about the same time. She asked me to read a poem she wrote about her own life and happenings if it were possible, and it was not, and if it were not then to in some fashion give it to K-B, which I did.
I deposited a copy of Are All The Animals In The Zoo in K-B's grave beside the urn that held her remains.
K-B's story is one that evolved over several years for me. I have to tell it in the past tense, mainly, and the reason becomes apparent as you hear her story. Her story comes out of the depths of depression and fear. It clearly expresses just how scary this thing called recovery appears to be.
The key word here is "appears".
For each of us, there is a process of 'Need To's' we have to go through. They are the very nature of life's trials and tribulations. We seem to acquire these trials and tribulations 'Need To's' early on in our existence and experience here, then have the rest of our lives to sort through the various conundrums generated by our early experiences.
Just how we came to have the particular set of 'Need To's' we do is likely to be different for each of us. The truth of the matter is that it really does not matter how we got the list, but it is important to know that each has our own. Some of us can make a great hullabaloo about how we got our list and some of us turn our acquisition process in to damned good stories. But each of us has our own particular story and 'way about things' and that 'way about things' is the script that will lead us to our own personal spiritual awakening. It is a script or curriculum for the soul's growth by the way. Not for the personality or the betterment of our character or to enhance our ability for personal acquisition or gains, and it is definitely not about right or wrong it is just about an opportunity for growth through experience, for the soul; many of us confuse that one.
A single mom K-B, had come to me, me as the therapist and she as a client, had attended several one-on-one-sessions. Just as we were about to get serious about the whole thing when she bolted and quit.
I got some history and that was about all. I knew that she was a member of the recovery movement; she attended Narcotics Anonymous (NA). I knew that she had struggled with being clean and sober. On again and off again. Like so many of us working a recovery program. She was drug addicted and she was attempting to work a program of recovery in "her-own way". "Her-own way" would prove to be the fatal flaw that was her undoing in the end.
She knew she had a problem and that her problem was manifested as drug addiction but it was the "manageability part" she had difficulty with. Step one, part two, sort of. After all, it was the drugs and the using of the drugs that gained the only relief for her from her pain. As I understood her story, she had been done-over many times with various boundary violations and she was not about to allow any of that to happen again, so regardless, she was "In Management".
She ran her own protection racket, because, as she had confided in me, a very deep part of her knew that her life depended upon it. And, pardon the pun, for the 'life of her' she could not let go of the process of protection and survival that the original hurt, hate, pain and fear set into motion and now life and its circumstances seemed to perpetuate. So there she was caught between the rock and a hard place, she could not step into her own recovery and actually get benefit from it for fear of letting the old 'ghosts' catch her unaware and hurting her again. You see, it was the ghosts of that hurt, hate, pain and fear that kept her ever so vigilant and alive or so she thought. Now the delusion of the predicament was that the protection racket that was supposedly keeping her free from the ever-present harm that lurked behind every shadow, was the very thing which would bring about her very demise.
It's like hanging on to the side of the swimming pool, too afraid to let go and take a chance, but wet none the less. All of the consequences and none of the benefits!
You see she had been harmed as a very little girl. She had been assaulted, violated and abused.
She was actually 'infamous' for her rants and raving about those very things at the various recovery meetings she attended.
God Bless her, she was able to get herself clean and sober but, and this is the tragedy, never sane. It was cyclical. Clean and sober but never sane then use drugs for relief. Repeat-Repeat-Repeat. What became apparent for me was that for K-B the underlying issue was the need for healthy understanding of forgiveness, but not forgiving those who did her, not in the classic sense that most understand forgiveness to be . . . "I forgive you for hurting me!" Not that!
You see, what became clear for me early on was that she was working from an inadequate model and understanding of the word forgiveness, and that was her trap. It follows like this: if you think you have to say that it is ok that what happened to you, happened . . . but at the same time in your own mind what happened could never be ok . . . then paradox has step up and it has you in its grip. There is no imaginable way out. (Know this, that there are those things that are classed and judged properly As Never Being Ok To Have Happened To You, Or Anyone Else, But The Did).
So it follows then: how could she or you or anyone else for that matter, forgive and gain the release you seek when you could not see the way out?
Well you can't.
This young lady had no real way out of her hurt and pain that she could either see or sense on her own. Those are the important words, on her own. Her very understanding of what she thought she was trying to do was the very thing that generated more hurt, hate, pain and fear, the one thing she was trying so desperately to escape. And doing it on her own was the cap on the bottle that kept it contained and dangerous.
Here is the working definition of forgiveness:
To be able to release myself from the hurt, hate, pain and fear of my past, to release that energy that I have personally invested in keeping me safe from the ghosts of my own past. Thus from the bondage I created to my past by my own feelings. The ones that are stored up deep down inside me and the ones that keep me stuck to the very persons, places or things (surrogates) that originally set the hurt, hate, fear and pain into motion in the first place.
It has nothing to do with me saying that what happened was ok, or it is now ok that someone else did what he or she did to me or others.
I need to unhook from those deep feelings of hurt, hate, fear and pain and all they represent to me, so I can get on with my life. The one I was born into and more importantly the one God intended me to have.
But for most of us the hurt, hate, fear and pain cycle is like the moth and the flame... we are always circling it and always getting burnt by it, and always wondering why the flame hurts and we are always within its easy grasp. It is as if we are mesmerized by it. It seems to take such a monumental effort to move away from that very thing that brings hurt . . .
My own feelings had become my worst enemy because they had me I did not have them and they had me. They controlled how I reacted and thought, and all of my deeper functions were working as hard as they could to protect me from those feelings that connected me to those people, place, events and memories that I have come to fear most because of my original experience with them. And here is the hard part to grasp, it was all locked inside of me. It was no longer out there trying to get in. It was already inside doing its handy work. Scaring me to death, slowly
It is something like hanging on to the rattlesnake. Once you got him in your grasp at least you know where he is, but again what do you do with him and when do you rest and if you do set him down what will happen to you?
So she now had to live her life adjusting to shadows of her past as she thought she perceived them. A sick cycle of action and reaction that has no end unless the cycle is broken someplace, usually in recovery and often in therapy but always with someone else that you come to learn to trust.
The problem being is that we believe that this process of "using" will actually help because it really does . . . temporally. Key word here is "temporally". Which of course is a perfect neophyte's explanation of addiction and the various processes connected to it.
Many who first come into recovery reach this place, clean, sober and insane. There is a difference between surrender to the greater cause of your own good and recovery, and complying with the various levels of healing in hopes of getting help without making yourself too vulnerable.
Compliance will not gain sanity, only surrender will, but it is so scary for some to imagine surrendering that it is virtually impossible to even consider that it as possible. That does not say it is impossible to do, just impossible to imagine.
K-B was on of those, one of those who were so scared that she could not imagine that it were possible to surrender.
A good working definition of surrender in recovery is working the 12 Steps with a sponsor and following directions given by the sponsor and not making deals and creating short cuts or doing things your own way. In short, doing things your sponsor's way rather then your way.
It basically comes in two parts, first, work the steps and part two is, with a sponsor. An approximate equal measure of both is required before desired results can be expected to happen. Do it their way, not you're way . . . that is the key, and as I said earlier it is too scary for some even to contemplate doing that.
This is about the point where if each of us is paying attention our own personal spiritual 'Need To' agenda, we begin to notice doing something comes into play. "I need to do this", "this has to happen", "I have to make amends", "I need to learn to be responsible", but all this comes after I surrender and begin to work the steps with someone.
But if I can't get past Step One . . . then!
For K-B it was surrender, and it was surrender coupled with a proper understanding and experience with the spiritual meaning of forgiveness. This all this taken over time and processed so that the memories and the ghosts could take their proper place on the shelves of her mind and be let go of.
Know this: that memories in their proper place are not haunting, they are simply what happened and that is all, just what happened.
There were also deeper forces at work here and one was the deeper need to begin the journey of trust with someone else and go with that person a ways on their journey of healing. A shared experience! Sort of walking hand in hand spiritually. With a sponsor!
"With" is the Key word here.
"Sharing" and "trusting" are other key words that go to describe the process that is necessary and a natural spin off of the 12 Steps.
And yes it does seem to matter how we do the 12 steps, i.e., various sources on the 12 Steps point out that not until the steps are done and done in order and done thoroughly will results happen. Now isn't that a fascinating concept when you think about it: do them in order and do them thoroughly that leaves 'my way' out of the process entirely.
In my years in the business of recovery, both as a consumer and as an agent/facilitator, I have found that a deviation from the 'pattern" or road map, even in the interest of saving time, cost me dearly, both in time and emotional energy. And for some, it cost them their lives, literally. K-B is an example.
She came into a treatment pattern and then ducked out before anything real could begin to happen claiming that the dollar cost was too much. About a year and a half after that duck out she received a court settlement from an auto accident that permitted her the opportunity to 'afford' the counseling. She had lost a kneecap in a motorcycle mishap. She called on a Tuesday morning and asked for an appointment, we talked briefly and I had an opening on the upcoming Friday morning at 8:30am and she filled it.
K-B was dead sometime on the intervening Thursday afternoon or early evening. "Od-ed" on heroin. Went down, as they say, like a ton of bricks - was dead before she hit the floor - at home in the shower, with the rig in her arm, a new car, a red Mustang convertible, sitting in the lane. And a 5-year-old little boy, her son, now abandoned to the world, by both his mom and dad, both taken by drug over doses.
K-B had an inkling of the wrongs that had happened to her. She had a powerful sense that something had been laying in wait for her and these hidden demon had been running her life. These things were distant scary ghosts as far as she was concerned, but they formed the fear patterns that drove her life and her addictions.
I attended her funeral. At the funeral I got to see who would, in all probability, have been the focus of her rage. I watched him stand at her graveside and try and sell (I choose my words carefully here), sell the idea to everyone present - well over 100 people - that any one of us would be welcome in his home, if we choose to come, to visit, to see him, after all, we were all friends of the dearly departed and after all we all loved her, didn't we? That he really had nothing to do with her death. That he really had done nothing wrong. Really!
It was both a spontaneous and a pitiful performance. The answer to why he made that pitiful pitch in the midst of the mourners at the graveside lay hidden in the darker reaches of his own mind. Only he knows what motivated him that day. It seemed obvious that as of that moment in time, he had not come to terms with his own demons. The ghosts of his own hurt, hate, pain and fear.
No one said anything. And I am sure no one believed him. The silence was deafening. We simply left him to his own fate. The fate of having to be himself and facing what he needed to face someday, but not that-day, to get on with the process of being who is was supposed to be, as God intended.
To some that may sound cruel but it's not.
Why? Because this thing called recovery is here for him to do too. But only if he chooses it. First, as it is for all of us who choose recovery as a way of life, we have to be prepared to surrender to the greater processes. Then, let go of our ego's agenda and our false-selves, and get honest, really, really honest, not just safely honest, but really, really honest and tell the truth as it really is and not as we would like it to be.
He never asked that day, but if he does, then someone will step forward and offer . . . His choice!
As an aside, it is an interesting fact that may or may not be true but hearsay suggests that 92% of those people in NA were sexually abused as children. It is just one of those things that get bantered about as real. Whether or not, I'm not sure, but I have met many that were. Far too many who were.
K-B was in NA.
A-M, who by the time of the funeral and these occurrences had long since passed out of the formal therapeutic setting, and resided else-where, contacted me when she heard of K-B's death.
The grapevine is quick.
She and K-B had been friends early on in recovery. They came in about the same time. She asked me to read a poem she wrote about her own life and happenings if it were possible, and it was not, and if it were not then to in some fashion give it to K-B, which I did.
I deposited a copy of Are All The Animals In The Zoo in K-B's grave beside the urn that held her remains.
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
Into the Light—Co Dependency as a Spiritual Journey
Into the Light—Co Dependency as a Spiritual Journey came about in my work as a matter of necessity. The book contains the benchmarks I used, the shifts in perception I noticed, the ideas I contemplated, the things I journalized about just to see into my own blind spots. The essence of the change and recovery process is the absolute necessity of seeing what I have been blind to. I knew that I had to look at things differently; my problem was ... how to do that. My life, for the most part, was difficult, very difficult, and not a pleasant place to be. But I knew all of that needed to change. I noticed that my chosen career was not really my choice; in fact, it really was a royal pain in the ass. I discovered that where “me and my life” were going was a disaster waiting for a place to happen. In fact, as clarity settled within and around me, I noticed that the disaster(s) had already happened and had struck more than once. I was reeling from them. I was unconsciously working on the next disaster; my own worst enemy was who I had become. That’s when I woke up to the fact that I needed to do my life differently—but how? This book is the construct I used to make a tool kit for life. I used my tool kit to find a place called Different. And what I discovered when I got there was that Different is a better place to be.
First Principle I Learned
Every Problem is a Spiritual Problem
and
Every Answer is a Spiritual Answer
A strong working relationship with Spirit and coming to terms with my rightful place in the universe—these are the defining qualities of recovery. It is a fact that we are all here on a journey. First, we must wake up to that fact, and then attempt to figure out just what the journey is supposed to be like. After that, get busy and get going. Personally, I knew I was supposed to do something, and I knew there was meaning to the entire mess I was in, but for the longest time it was a total mystery to me. I started my journey by learning how to meditate early in 1973, and that’s when I opened “The Door.”
The Spiritual Journey is a Very Scary Thing To Do,
Always was—Always will be.
Simple truth: I have to do this journey somehow, in some fashion at some time. My only choice is when I do it, not if I do it. That was a hard one to swallow.
Satiating Snacks for the Soul
... Opportunities to see things differently...
Not the way I have been trained to see
But instead
The way God intended me to see.
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Beginning An Old Spy Yarn ... Sheritt A Spy Story
The turn of the century has come and gone. As I write this we are well into 2008, my children have grown and gone off, each having the lives they want for themselves and hopefully getting to do, in some measure, what it was that I got to do. I have extended family that stretches from Australia, through South Africa and across Europe and North America. My business now has nothing to do with my early years during the decade of the 1970’s. Today I am a therapist and help people sort through their life’s conundrums. But when I was young I had a different life, I had a different dream about what I wanted to do and I was fortunate enough to get a chance to lead that life for a space in time.
It was a life where up was down and what you saw was not what was there to be seen. It was very tricky; it was a confined little world; it was very slippery, and could be deadly at times. It was filled with smoke and mirrors and it could have prolonged periods of boredom that could drive you up the wall to the point of distraction and then shift gears suddenly to flood you with a few brief moments of sheer terror so intense that you would wish to hell that you had never ever got yourself in ‘this position’ in the first place. For a young man of my age... mid 20’s, this was the place to be. For those romantics out there it had the combined attraction of being the leading edge in both mystery and mystique.
I was in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Security Service and I got to do what I had dreamt about doing all through my teen years. Ian Fleming’s 007/Bond books intrigued me to no end during my high school years. From Fleming I forged on into all the facets of spy vs. spy. If it came down to a push comes to shove, then either Len Deighton or John le Carré write the best trade craft.
Reading and daydreaming about the cloak-and-dagger world that they wrote about held my focus through that entire phase of my growing up. It was a world I longed to get into but a world that I had no idea where the entry point was. It was a secret world with a secret entrance. At the time I had no idea that James Bond was modeled after a Canadian from Winnipeg. Sir William Samuel Stephenson, CC, MC, DFC, (January 23, 1897 – January 31, 1989) who was a Canadian soldier, airman, businessman, inventor, spymaster, and the senior representative of British intelligence for the entire western hemisphere during World War II. Stephenson is best-known by his wartime intelligence code name of Intrepid. But I learned.
After I completed basic training with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police at “P” Division in Alberta, I was posted to ‘D” Division, and more precisely Winnipeg Sub/Div and the Rural Detachment at Portage la Prairie, Manitoba. The detachment had its offices behind the head offices of Chicken Delight on Saskatchewan Avenue. The gentleman, the owner of Chicken Delight Canada, parked his Rolls Royce alongside our Highway Patrol black and white cruisers in the dirt lot at the side of the office. The Rolls had had a moment in the spot light it had once been owned by Gordon Sinclair . There were six of us there on detachment a Sergeant, a stenographer, and four constables; I was junior man on detachment.
It was here when and where I discovered one of the portals into the world of spy vs. spy. It was at the Tasty Bakery right next to the Detachment offices that provided me the opportunity to step across into the world of counter-intelligence.
I came to learn that it was an insidious little world. It operated in plain sight for anyone who cared to notice but most did not; it was a world within a world that loped along in a rather sinister fashion unbeknown to most.
One spring day two fellows turned up at the front counter of our office. They looked like cops, they were in street clothes and maybe not cops at all, but they just had that look about them. I went to see if I could help or be of assistance. One of these guys replied that they wanted to speak to the senior constable. They called him by his Christian name and when Don heard his name he came out of the back room. It was like old home week; these guys were obviously one of the boys. They were invited in and disappeared with Don into the deeper bowels of the detachment. Coffee time came and as usual we all trooped right next door to the Tasty Bakery for coffee and a freshly made Bismarck .
It was here that I overheard that these mysterious visitors were in S & I, Security and Intel for the uninitiated. They worked on the Cuban Desk, whatever the hell that meant, but I was hooked. That coffee and donuts chance encounter started me in a direction that would lead me to a place where I would spend the next decade of my life getting to do what it was that I had always fantasized doing.
I got to catch spies for a living.
Imagine that, getting to live your wildest imagined flights of fancy. There I was, from 1971 through to 1979, right in the middle of the cold war both internationally and within the framework of Canada. I was working on issues that would be discussed on the floor of the House of Commons and doing things that would to some degree shift the direction history would take, sometimes ever so slightly and sometimes on a much larger scale.
It was my grandson who asked me one day, “Papa what did you do way back then?” That got me thinking about all the crazy things we did.
First, he wanted to know more about his papa and all children love to have stories told to them.
Second, I had always wanted to write, but I thought my mild dyslexia would prevent me from doing so. God bless the invention of the computer and spell check.
Third, my actual attempt(s) at writing the all-encompassing Canadian spy novel was a more daunting task than I ever imagined.
My first problem was I could not, for the life of me, get past page three. I just froze up there, the story died on the page with try after try. Then I heard a CBC interview with JK Rowling by Michael Enright. She was pumping one of her Harry Potter novels just before Christmas. She said during the interview with Enright that she was struggling with resolving a character in the midst of either her third or fourth book that was still on the drawing board. It struck me during the course of that interview that she really had no idea exactly where the character was going; she was just writing the story as she heard it in her head. That interview gave me the key. I realized I didn’t need to plan every detail before I wrote it. Over that Xmas period I simply sat down at the computer and wrote a 158-page outline of Sheritt, A Spy Story.
I simply let it flow.
It was a wonderful thing to experience; the secret to writing was not to try too hard.
The story was there to be told. I did not have to invent, although invention was very much a part of the process. All I had to do was to set the spinning wheel spinning. To paraphrase and adapt Nike, “Just Tell It”.
But true to the tradecraft and the traditions of the genre I mixed metaphors, of both whimsy and truth, about people both real and imagined to come to a place of telling, “Papa what did you do way back then?”
I am one of the fortunate souls who got the opportunity to chase after their dreams. There are people I would like to thank.
For those people who go unnamed or name-changed to protect the guilty because they lived and worked it too, on both sides of the multi faceted fence. If you are all still alive it would be amusing to get together and tell war stories about the one that got away. We had a reunion of sorts in Vancouver several years ago. An ad hoc event facilitated by one of the guys in a restaurant on King George Highway I think. I walked in and all that I could see was a group of old men seated at a breakfast table; then it struck me ... I was one of those old guys. I still smile at that one.
For those other people who read and re-read this thing with me. All those Sunday afternoons just going over and over one point after another, chasing down facts, all the stuff that goes into writing this type of book. Tait, Adianne, Alexander, Dixie and for Lynne, Charlene, Jennie and Murray T (who passed recently) who gave me encouragement and for all those who just edited it so they could have a look and see what was happening next, I thank you.
This is the beginning of a set of tales first about a wise old native gentleman, very real... who for whatever reason wove his web through my spy catching days. As this tale unwinds it spreads itself out over several stories told in a series of books. This is the first of what I believe will be six possibly seven books telling the three stories.
I am sure the old gentleman is dead because when I knew him he was well into his 80’s and that was in the mid 1970’s. I also know that a number of the players have passed also ... Old age does that to us all. But the joy that I get out of telling a tale or two is simply uplifting. I’ll let my alter ego, Steve; tell the rest of the tale.
Neil Douglas-Tubb
Victoria BC 2011
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