In recovery, I’m going through a process of refurbishing my instrument.
There are gaps and cracks in the body, the neck is out of whack and needs to be realigned, the bridge needs care, and the strings are old and need to be replaced and tuned.
The way I’m doing this is through daily prayer and meditation, taking a course where I’m reading the Bible as poetry, reading and writing poems, participating in a book club reading Paradise Lost, taking personal inventory about the resentments I hold and the people with whom I need to make amends, visiting with others in recovery to share experience, strength, and hope, and fostering the eternal fire that makes me a complete person who lives and loves alongside the others I wish to treat with Love and Compassion.
This self needs to be reconstructed so that it can be whole, so that it can integrate into the world and thus be integrated, to have integrity. To be its own self so that it can feel that connection with other selves, to participate in the rhythm and harmony of Life in the Cosmos.
This work is slow, and requires attention. Radical honesty, practicing acute self-awareness without the vindictive judgment that can break the instrument through pressure and keep it stuck in the shameful state of isolation.
Here’s some Coleridge:
“And what if all of animated nature
Be but organic Harps diversely framed,
That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,
At once the Soul of each, and God of all?”
— The Aeolian Harp
I hope you have a marvelous day.
Attentively,
Aaron