Absorption

I’m in Wyoming for a family reunion. Been looking forward to this for months! My dad lives in a tiny town up in the mountains, and I grew up in a bigger town a couple of hours away out on the plains. The wide open. But I’m up here now, and I love the shade, the pine trees, the creek flowing by this little cabin where my partner and I are staying for the next three days.

Day 55 of no alcohol.

Half the family hardly drinks at all (my immediately family, which includes a dad whose stomach can’t handle it anymore (though he never drank much to begin with); a brother who crashed and almost burned re: alcohol back around 2001-2003, went through a treatment program, and has been well and sober and increasingly happier ever since; a brother-in-law who’s been sober since he was 22 and is a very devoted AA-goer; a sister who simply doesn’t drink much (married to the brother-in-law). The other folks do drink some, sometimes a lot, perhaps some alcohol dependence issues are scattered in there, though nothing loud or conspicuous. But alcohol will be around.

At the moment I have just shifted my attention into this forest. I feel my task this weekend is … ready for this? … absorbing peace. From the trees and air, as it happens. (I’ve never known what the blog title means. It just came to me one day in 2015 when I was lying on my living room floor (daytime, sober, but yes lying on the floor) thinking about the whole drinking thing and trying once again to quit.)

I’m so happy to see my relatives — some cousins and aunts who I love and don’t get to see very often — but I’m also an introvert and I think I drank to escape, oh, people (still trying to see better just what the anxiety was, cuz I’m certainly not shy), and so having this happen now, in my new quitting-drinking, was bothering me a bit.

And now I know my attachment this weekend is meant to be to the trees and running water coming out of the mountains.

Absorbing peace.

love,

Adrian