Recover can be a return to spiritual life

Page 5

Tansi, ahnee and hello. The city of moonlight. Inside my head is a man with a horn. Jazz. I imagine him sitting alone on a window ledge somewhere blowing gigantic holes of incandescent blue in the night sky. The luminescence around me throws silhouettes of house and tree and schoolyard into patterns and shapes at once foreign

and familiar. I'm strolling the same city street I used to prowl not so long ago.

There's a vague, soft yearning that calls me here into this night, this space, this place in time. Maybe it's the genetic memory of drums and fires on distant hills or, perhaps, merely a simple need for a stretch of the legs and a stretch of the spirit. Regardless, I head out on these unplanned journeys whenever the motions of that vague, soft yearning hit me.

I call it my gratitude walk. I take it every now and again when there's no particular place to go, people to be seen or something to be done. Pulling a jazz or blues CD from my shelf, I insert it into my portable player and head out to walk the streets to think and feel.

Solitude. I revel in my aloneness these days as much as I celebrate the presence

of friends and family. It used to be that such solitary nights were the birthplace of pain, misery, frustration and lostness. These days they're a handshake with my life.

Soon it will be National Addictions Awareness Week. Soon we'll be in the middle of another week in 52 geared primarily to recognition of recovery in our circles. Recovery from the abuses that threaten the survival of our collective spirits and communities. Recovery from negative choices and actions that stem from diseases called alcoholism and addition.

Recovery. I asked someone about it a few years back when I couldn't find a suitable definition for myself. People around me were talking about recovery, recovery, recovery and despite my rampant alcoholism and drug addiction, I wrestled with the word.

The old man I talked to told me something I've never forgotten.

He said that when we're sent out into the world as babies we're sent out as spiritual copies of the creator. We are, in fact, spiritual creations. Because we're spiritual creations we're sent out into the world covered in spiritual qualifies like love, trust, honesty, faith, humility, respect, loyalty and self-worth. Each of us are born the same way.

Then, because the world is the way it is, things happen. As we move through the motions of our lives thing happen. Those spiritual qualities are somehow removed from us. They're spanked off, churched off, educated off, beaten off or sometimes, simply shrugged off.

When we choose to drink or use substance, he said, we rinse those qualities off completely. We rinse them off. And the agonies we alcoholics and addicts feel when we're using those things is the agony of our spirits calling for the covering comfort of those spiritual qualities. A return to innocence.

When we make ourselves available to a process that leads us back to ourselves,

we make ourselves available to the process of "re-covering: ourselves in those spiritual qualities we were born with. That process can be the traditional healing practices of our people or it can be the 12 steps of established recovery programs. Or, as I choose for myself these days, it can be a combination of both.

Either way, he told me, recovery is the process of making myself available to something on a daily basis that will allow me to "re-cover" myself in the spiritual qualities I was sent out into the world with.

I think of that often when I remember things like National Addictions Awareness Week. Recovery is happening all across Indian country. Every day it starts when someone somewhere reaches out to share themselves and their recovery history with someone else.

My gratitude walks are part of that process for myself. I reconnect to the poetry of this world out there among the stars and street lamps. I reconnect to the voice of my spirit. I reconnect to the days when those streets and alleys were ome. A cold and empty home. I reconnect to the gratitude that I don't have to live there anymore.

And whether it's John Coltrane, B.B. King or Kashtin on the headphones, I reach out and gather up some of that poetry,. embrace it and carry the feeling of it back into the motions of my life.

Until next time, Meegwetch.