As the mist burns off, the heat is stunning, like a blow in the face when i go out to cut lavender from the bushes of Hidcote lavender, a perfect lilac blue.
I have been trying to change the design theme of my blog without success. I have deleted all my cookies in vain.
But I am sober and grateful for another day of sanity and that is all that matters. All kinds of wonderful things may or may not happen in sobriety but the big thing is that we stay sober. I had emails from friends who are struggling to get sober again and I hope with all my heart they make it.
There is no mystery about getting sober and staying that way. Anyone who goes to AA and stays away from the first drink one day at a time and works through the Steps to the best of his or her ability and gets involved in service will stay sober.
I may be more isolated geographically but thousands of loners like me have stayed connected modem to modem and read the BB each morning and done the Steps and worked on relating to our Higher Power and that is somehow good enough. We want to stay sober more than we want to drink.
Made the mistake of opening a jar of honey, dark golden organic fynbos honey from the mountains, and leaving it open on the kitchen counter. Now the kitchen is full of ferocious furry black African bees thrumming against the windows and crawling over the sink. I give them a wide berth because these are not your docile yellow honey bees from Europe. The stings are excruciating and I don’t have anti-histamines in the house.
Friends for supper this evening, so I am making a special wild mushroom risotto with truffle oil. And this morning I am going to pack Console glass jars with dried herbs that have been in a cool over overnight, then draft out another chapter for my Nanowrimo novel. I am taking Shakespeare’s The Tempest as a structuring device. My list of characters includes a failed magician for Prospero, his child-wife Miranda, an androgynous dryad named Ariel and a Welsh ceramicist or potter for Caliban. And there will be the mother of all storms as an opener. Oh how literary! But I have no idea what to do with the characters once I have them trapped in the ruined priory/farmhouse above the snow line with spring breaking through in the white hawthorn.
More will be revealed, I tell myself. The trick with writing is to sit down and write. But first I shall lure the bees out of the kitchen and play in the garden for a brief while…
Ah, Mary. I use your blog as an escape. Have I ever told you that? It transports me to a different place in my head like no other blog can.
Sobriety: I literally had to sit on my hands in the early days just to ensure I wouldn’t pick up a drink. I will often share that with newcomers. I suppose they feel that it should feel magickal? Sometimes it just doesn’t.
My two favourite things: Fresh lavender and risotto.
Perhaps the characters could sit there, licking honey off their fingers and slapping away bees…
I wish I could dine at your cottage, sit with you and laugh ourselves silly. I am having a cup of rooibos tea as I type. The honey is not your beautioful golden honey, but the honey from the sourwood and tulip poplar trees that our bees in North Carolina made for us. We arrived back in the midwest with about 5 gallons or more of the stuff. It is dark and rich and almost outflavors anything you put it in. sigh….but-it is ours. Knowing that we had a hand in herding bees into the 2 hives we maintained at the back of our property somehow blankets all its sins….
I am struggling to get sober yet again. The things I read on your blog are the only things that make sobriety seem attractive. I just don’t know how to get there. It would be nice to hear from you. And I will continue to read
Grace x