i don't know if you care but this helped me out a lot just now. of the handful of truly thoughtful individuals i know, this lack of spiritual fulfillment is, in my experience, the single most potent immobilizing factor among them (second, maybe, to drug abuse). even as i fancy myself as having the most genuine conceptions of humanity, i buckle at the sobering realization that upon my death, it is all gone, and the closest i can come to imagining such a "time" is to imagine time before my birth. nothingness frozen in nothingness
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I'm glad that it helps you to read it- it helps me a lot to write it. I used to have very complex discussions with my ex about AA. I also stopped drinking without AA, but I absolutely adore the organization, "higher power" and all. My ex worked at a recovery facility and was less sanguine about the religiosity. For me, the "higher power" in the room is the set of other people engaged in telling and hearing each other's stories and caring about how they turn out. God, as you say, embodied in social ritual. How many people, by the time they make it to AA, still have the experience, in any given year of hearing a roomful of people say their name? It is, if you'll pardon the double-negative, the ultimate ananomie.
totally. the soothing, rhythmically chanted introductions and axioms are one of the things i miss most about that organization. it felt like a religious experience to me partially because it was so churchy! fucking candles and books and everything. if you're disinterested in orthodoxy, it may be the only place you can find such a thing anymore. it remains, for me, the last place i can remember finding the space to submit to a momentary suspension of reason in the interest feeling like "it's all gonna be okay."
the stubborn atheist in me eventually won and i have ceased to attend meetings. but i carry from that experience the sense that "the movement" (i.e. "radicals" or whatever who maintain that, for instance, oil is a foolish thing upon which to build an economy) has suffered for it's dead material universe, as reasoned as that conviction may be.
darlin. why do we live so far apart? isn't it crazy? the circles, what draws us back and back again?
dirt first is why i want to be a doctor. and prolly no one gets that better than you.
i'm tired anne, and heartbroken. not sure where our future is. we know the ending to our stories, but we close our eyes and put one foot ahead of the other and pray that we end up somewhere new.
We all want to feel like our lives matter, that our preparation is not in vain. Your community may be small, but maybe it's stretching too far to try to minister to people who aren't making it into your circles. You can make the circles bigger, but only within reason. This blog is one, you have others at work and in other places. And you do change the world there, as much as you did when you tried to block the highway. Those actions change the world, but maybe on a smaller, more human scale, and for some reason this is hard for us to view. Our trans lives are already marginal. We're already in some interesting little cracks that have developed in this time and place, giving us a space called trans in a field called gender, and how we live there is one genre of story of the human experience. It's interesting to the outsider, but to me and my kind, it's vital. We need to hear our own kind telling us about living their lives. I'm here doing it, too. I think my blog matters, on a small scale. At least it's a manageable scale, not too
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the stubborn atheist in me eventually won and i have ceased to attend meetings. but i carry from that experience the sense that "the movement" (i.e. "radicals" or whatever who maintain that, for instance, oil is a foolish thing upon which to build an economy) has suffered for it's dead material universe, as reasoned as that conviction may be.
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dirt first is why i want to be a doctor. and prolly no one gets that better than you.
i'm tired anne, and heartbroken. not sure where our future is. we know the ending to our stories, but we close our eyes and put one foot ahead of the other and pray that we end up somewhere new.
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