Bone Yard

Days of Sobriety = 361

I still have those nights of digging up the bones of my matrimony to booze, as evidenced in my blog of a week ago, Once In A Blue Moon , but I never wake up in the morning wishing I'd drank the night before.

Last night I had my first drinking dream in a long time, I was with the cap'n and my boys on some tropical vacation, at one point in the dream I was sitting alone in a bar/restaurant and when I got up I realized I could barely walk.  Then I belatedly realized, that I had just drank one drink and I marveled at how quick and hard it hit me, and immediately all those old compensation methods kicked in, how to try to walk and talk so nobody would know that I'd been drinking, and I was already planning about how I was going to lie to you all about it. 

Of course, I was blessedly relieved when I woke up to find it was all a dream and I remembered that in the dream my boys had been much younger than they are now.  They had been teens and tweens, the same age they were when my drinking was escalating, so maybe that dream was a necessary visit to the Bone Yard.  A gentle reminder?

I'm on call this weekend, so even though I'm not scheduled to work I set the alarm for 6:00 am so I could jump out of bed and put on my make-up and curl my hair just in case I get called out and have to go to work where I will don a surgical cap and mask and cover it all up anyway.  Go figure.

But then I crawled back into bed with my laptop and started strolling through the blogs, what a pleasure it is to be able to do so at my leisure this Saturday morning instead of in a pre-dawn rush before I go to work or in the evening when I am a barely functioning, brain dead zombie.

My friend and mentor, cp, posted a poem this week about how we find our way through recovery on the bones of others.  So it seems  this morning, I've been strolling through yet another Bone Yard. The poem is from the book,  The Zen of Recovery.

The Bones of Others

by 

Mel Ash

If you are here to read this,

think of those who aren't.

Pray for them:good thoughts for those

who lost their minds, love and years

to compulsion, addiction and fears.

Think of their great sacrifice.

We recover on the bones of others.

Wrap your loving thoughts around them:

alone no more.

If you are here and recovering

your original shining true self,

a moment of silence for those driven mad,

by the voices and screams of disease--

driven dreams. We walk from night to day

on a path made of the bones of others.

Hold them tightly in the warm arms of your spirit:

cold no more

If you are here and attaining freedom,

A thousand bows for those who didn't

reach this shore and drowned in a

sea of despair:suffering no more.

We walk in freedom past cages made

of the bones of others.

They hand us the keys of desperation.

Quench their burning thirst

with the tears of your soul.

Calm their cravings. Still their minds.

Grant them peace in the dark and

lonely places below and above the ground.

Fill the gaping holes left by their deaths

with the immensity of your love.

Remember them as you sleep;

remember them as you wake.

Only a thought is the difference

between you and the bones of others.

To all of those that have gone before me, all of those who walk along side of me, and all of those that will follow:  Thank You

P.S. Randy looks a lot finer here than he did in his recent mug shots.  Hey Randy, if you need a shoulder, give me a holler.