HOPE'S HILL

HOPE’S HILL 

It was a cold January morning when I first slip- slided up that “Hill of Hope” and my mood inside was as gray as the sky above.  “Hill of Hope”, (if you’ll pardon the expression,) was more a hope of faith-filled expectation rather than an expected outcome at the end of a month of what was immediately perceived of as an indeterminate and perhaps interminable incarceration.

I arrived at the gates of this retreat established by the famous Bill W. himself, at the behest (or rather the dire warning) of my sponsors who felt that another month or two out in the world would inevitably leave me as close to death as one could come without actually summoning up Charon himself.  These direnesses were pronounced by practiced AA hands, but from my own besotted viewpoint, I felt they were well off the mark.  However, there was ample precedent on their side, if anyone was keeping a tally.

The grayness of my mood, the coldness of the weather, chilled me to the very core right to my bones. And I continued with that chill for the remainder of that first week. My mind was a haze, one day seeping into the next, me not noticing where the night became dawn. Was it cold in the room or outside? Was that my mood thawing or just the ground? Was I warming to the people around me or were they just beginning to realize what a pleasant guy I was all along?

It is often a sign of how self important we take ourselves to be when we start immediately writing our thoughts down, as if what we have to say as our besotted thoughts ooze away will be so insightful that once forgotten, if we do not record them for posterity, they will be lost to the world  with the consequent immensity such privation of what so much brilliant philosophical musings would mean. Think of all of those characters who upon their arrival at the doorstep of history, started to take or caused to have taken, copious notes and copies of their correspondence, letters and thoughts  about anything from grocery lists, to ammunition to sewing needles. This was typical of all of the giants of our great revolutionary war among whom we certainly count Adams, Washington, Jefferson and Hamilton. Each of whom had meticulous notes of their comings and goings during the heyday and any day of the revolution.

So I said “Why not I?” After all, I was undergoing a sort of revolution myself! So I started to take down my brilliance and by the end of the first 10 days, I had a substantial set of what I think I considered perceptive insights into my personal evolution, how I got to where I was, what I thought had happened and what I thought I could do about it.

So imagine how crestfallen I was when someone stole my notebook! Yes stole! Well it could not have been anything else could it? How could I have misplaced it, right? There were only 8 rooms in the “Bunk House” and I stayed in only two, so where could it have gone, so it must have been stolen!

That I could have misplaced it in some area where I would not be able to find it never once occurred to me.  That I may have even suffered a blackout in this recovery never occurred to me either.  Any other type of temporary amnesia? Unlikely.

But it may have been a good thing that I did lose this book in which for the first seven to ten days I vomited all of the random garbage that projected from my mind. Kind of like that vomiting that occurs as the result of menningeal irritation; convulsive, uncontrollable irresistible projectile vomiting that winds up feet from the mouth. That’s what happened except what got projected was all of the mean, low and sick thinking that was roiling in my mind for the past thirty years. The muck that had been stirring between my ears, fueled by alcohol and ignited by rage and anger and fear.

So the loss of that book was probably not a bad idea, maybe even fortuitous. Leave behind all of those bad feelings and start with a fresh less agitated palate cleared of the years of bitterness. 

Slower breathing, with the nostrils cleansed of the stench of anger and fear.

So by the end of the first ten days I was prepared to finally listen to the message of recovery, not rebreathe the effluvium of anger, rage ,defeat, hate and fear.  I could listen to a message of faith, spirituality and hope.

And maybe it was best that this transformation had occurred in the winter. In fact it was more likely to have occurred in the winter with all of the elements of the world symbolically opposing my recovery. That was OK. I live for symbolism.  And it is better than dying for symbolism. 

So when I returned to the “Hill of Hope” this past Thursday, and it was 85 degrees out, the sky blue and clear and a gentle wind and the smells of honeysuckle on the breeze, it was like walking onto an Elysian Field. A place of peace. As much as any ‘institution’ can be called home, it felt like I had returned to a place of intimate comfort. This Hill was where I had spilled my most private thoughts and fears, the worst of me. And sometimes when one revisits the scenes of ‘degradations’ like that, one may be wary of what the result will be.

But there was definitely a calm as soon as I stepped out of my car. The quiet, the trees, the birds and the breeze.

And then there was that chapel where Bill W wrote the big book.  Yes this place had history, but for me, it had my history. My recovery. It is where I finally realized that if I wanted to live, I had to give up the drink. I could no longer fool myself that I was anything but an alcoholic and that I had to finally face that fact and do something about that. And stop kidding myself that anyone else was at fault for anything about that sobriety except me, regardless of what little niggling thing about some resentment I had about a small part of my story someone else had played in it.

It did not matter. I was responsible for the outcome. Nobody put a glass of booze to my mouth and browbeat  me into drinking it.  I drank it and only I could have taken that glass and put it down.

So on this sunny Thursday, despite my reason for returning to the “Hill of Hope”, it is clear to me that Hill “saved my life and then gave me a life”. 

“There are no coincidences in life”,  goes the AA credo, and I suppose my visit to the “Hill of Hope” demonstrated that. I learned a great lesson in humility that day . You may be dragged kicking to what you perceive as an abattoir where you think you hear the screaming of the damned.  But the squeals you hear turn out to be your own.

But when you can finally see through the doped haze of addiction, you will no longer be in thrall to those fears and will look back on them as quaint and misinformed notions of a sick mind. And you learn that with an open mind, unmediated by alcohol or drugs, even the most obdurate deniers of reality can be taught.

© res 7/7/2011