“. . .sometimes one feels freer speaking to a stranger than to people one knows. Why is that?”
“Probably because a stranger sees us the way we are, not as he wishes to think we are.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
Category Archives: STEP 5
This is the step where humility smacks us right between the eyes. It was one thing to write out our inventory for ourselves. As for sharing it with God—if there is a God, He’d know all about us anyway.
But we’re also being asked to share our inventory with another person! This is asking too much! Why can’t we simply assess ourselves and get on with the business of cleaning up our lives?
More Comments About Step 5
This may be one of the most challenging steps we face in our recovery process, but it can also be one of the most fulfilling in terms of removing us from our isolation. In order to accomplish Step 5, the three-part sharing it endorses must take place. That is, all of what we discovered about ourselves in our Step 4 inventory is to be freely admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being.
…Because these areas are so sensitive and so very personal, it is important to exercise care in choosing the person or persons with whom we formally share our fifth step. Such individuals should be trustworthy and somewhat detached from the situations about which we will share. For example, one would not usually call on a spouse or immediate family member to hear this confession. In fact, it is quite common to choose a therapist or pastoral counselor for this purpose. Also, such individuals should be compassionate, not condemning.
– Serenity, A Companion for Twelve Step Recovery, p. 45,46
Non e scappato chi si strascina la catena dietro. He is not free who drags his chain after him.
It’s a strange world of language in which skating on thin ice can get you into hot water. ~Franklin P. Jones
Garbage in garbage out ~ George Fuechsel
It looked like something knitted as a present by a colourblind aunt, the sort of thing you wouldn’t dare throw away in case the garbage collectors laughed at you and kicked your trash cans over. PRATCHETT.
Home life as we understand it is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo.
George Bernard Shaw Getting Married, preface,’Hearth and Home’.
That sulphur-crested bird with great white wings, The wise, harsh bird - as old and wise as Time Whose well-dark eyes the wonder kept and closed. Rosemary Dobson
I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone. ― Rainer Maria Rilke
“And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.”
Roald Dahl
Peppa bu’n hot, but ih good fi curry. meaning: Everything has its usefulness. A good advice/counsel might be painful to take/accept. Jamaica.
Goody Two-Shoes
Two-Shoes, Two-Shoes,
Little Goody Two-Shoes!
Do you know about her? Well,
I’m ready now to tell
How the little creature came
By so odd a name.
Little Goody Two-Shoes!
Do you know about her? Well,
I’m ready now to tell
How the little creature came
By so odd a name.
Clara Doty Bates
“Charity is prescribed for each descendant of Adam every day the sun rises.” He was then asked: “From what do we give charity every day?” The Prophet answered: “The doors of goodness are many… enjoining good, forbidding evil, removing harm from the road, listening to the deaf, leading the blind, guiding one to the object of his need, hurrying with the strength of one’s legs to one in sorrow who is asking for help, and supporting the feeble with the strength of one’s arms — all of these are charity prescribed for you.” He also said: “Your smile for your brother is charity.” – Fiqh-us-Sunnah, Volume 3, Number 98
The Sydney Morning Herald (NSW : 1842 – 1954), Saturday 23 January 1926
The chains of addiction are too light to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.
The Wilderness
for Peter Barden
Penury in Sydney had grown stale
And, at twenty-two, my childhood was in danger
So I preceded you, in all but spirit,
To the far-back country
Where the tar roads end.
In the silent lands
Time broadens into space.
Approaching Port Augusta, going on,
Iron-brown and limitless, the plains
Were before me all day. Burnt mountains fell behind
In the glittering sky.
At dawn, the sun would roll up from his lair
In the kiln-dry lake country, fire his heat straight through
The blind grey scrub, awaken me beside wheeltracks
And someone’s car, and I would travel on.
At noon, far out in a mirage, I would brew
Tea with strangers, yarn about jobs in the North
And, chewing quietly, watch maybe an upstart
Dust-devil forming miles off, going high
To totter, darken
And, quite suddenly, vanish
Leaving a formless, thinning stain in the heavens.
Where the spirits of sea-cliffs
Hovered on the plain
I would remember routines we had invented
For putting spine into shapeless days: the time
We passed at a crouching trot down Wynyard Concourse
Tell each other in loud mock-Arunta and gestures
What game we were tracking down what haunted gorge . . .
Frivolous games
But they sustained me like water,
They, and the is-ful ah!-nesses of things.
http://www.lesmurray.org/uncollected_twc.htm#rttw
Euroa Advertiser (Vic. : 1884 – 1920), Friday 20 February 1885,
The chains of addiction are too light to be felt until they are too strong to be broken. SWAHILI.
http://swahiliproverbs.afrst.illinois.edu/love.html
A false witness will not go unpunished, and he who breathes out lies will not escape. Proverbs 19:5
“I’m simply saying that there is a way to be sane. I’m saying that you can get rid of all this insanity created by the past in you. Just by being a simple witness of your thought processes.
It is simply sitting silently, witnessing the thoughts, passing before you. Just witnessing, not interfering not even judging, because the moment you judge you have lost the pure witness. The moment you say “this is good, this is bad,” you have already jumped onto the thought process.
It takes a little time to create a gap between the witness and the mind. Once the gap is there, you are in for a great surprise, that you are not the mind, that you are the witness, a watcher.
And this process of watching is the very alchemy of real religion. Because as you become more and more deeply rooted in witnessing, thoughts start disappearing. You are, but the mind is utterly empty.
That’s the moment of enlightenment. That is the moment that you become for the first time an unconditioned, sane, really free human being.”
― Osho
There should be those among whom we can sit and weep and still be counted as warriors. Native American.
I have spent too long
telling the world the world is the world
and poetry is made of language.
Today on the Bedford platform, I began
the great poem: weeping openly on the public
telephone—the way some were staring
as they swirled past, the way some
weren’t—yes: it was truth
at last.
—Jan Zwicky
one of my favourite poems
LES MURRAY
An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow
The word goes round Repins,
the murmur goes round Lorenzinis,
at Tattersalls, men look up from sheets of numbers,
the Stock Exchange scribblers forget the chalk in their hands
and men with bread in their pockets leave the Greek Club:
There’s a fellow crying in Martin Place. They can’t stop him.
The traffic in George Street is banked up for half a mile
and drained of motion. The crowds are edgy with talk
and more crowds come hurrying. Many run in the back streets
which minutes ago were busy main streets, pointing:
There’s a fellow weeping down there. No one can stop him.
The man we surround, the man no one approaches
simply weeps, and does not cover it, weeps
not like a child, not like the wind, like a man
and does not declaim it, nor beat his breast, nor even
sob very loudly—yet the dignity of his weeping
holds us back from his space, the hollow he makes about him
in the midday light, in his pentagram of sorrow,
and uniforms back in the crowd who tried to seize him
stare out at him, and feel, with amazement, their minds
longing for tears as children for a rainbow.
Some will say, in the years to come, a halo
or force stood around him. There is no such thing.
Some will say they were shocked and would have stopped him
but they will not have been there. The fiercest manhood,
the toughest reserve, the slickest wit amongst us
trembles with silence, and burns with unexpected
judgements of peace. Some in the concourse scream
who thought themselves happy. Only the smallest children
and such as look out of Paradise come near him
and sit at his feet, with dogs and dusty pigeons.
Ridiculous, says a man near me, and stops
his mouth with his hands, as if it uttered vomit—
and I see a woman, shining, stretch her hand
and shake as she receives the gift of weeping;
as many as follow her also receive it
and many weep for sheer acceptance, and more
refuse to weep for fear of all acceptance,
but the weeping man, like the earth, requires nothing,
the man who weeps ignores us, and cries out
of his writhen face and ordinary body
not words, but grief, not messages, but sorrow,
hard as the earth, sheer, present as the sea—
and when he stops, he simply walks between us
mopping his face with the dignity of one
man who has wept, and now has finished weeping.
Evading believers, he hurries off down Pitt Street.
from
The Weatherboard Cathedral, 1969
http://www.lesmurray.org/pm_aor.htm
It is a foolish sheep that makes the wolf its confessor.
Italian
Cha nee tra ta’n cheyrrey gee yn ouw to cheet r’ee.
“It is not when the sheep eats the march-penny it tells a tale”
(literally, “it comes to her”)-
i.e., The result of evil-doing is not always apparent at first.
The ouw is a slow poison.
The telling of a story, like virtually everything in this life, was always made all the easier by a cup of tea.”
Alexander McCall Smith, The Miracle at Speedy Motors
The best thing about tea, above everything else, is that it lubricates the grey matter.
The eye doesn’t carry anything but it recognises a heavy load.
http://www.sierra-leone.org/Krio-Proverbs.html
“Are we going to unload these things?” she asked, a trace of nervousness creeping into her voice. “They’re starting to gross me out.”
“They’re just souls.”
“But they’re warm. Like eggs. I feel like a spawning salmon.”
― Gina Damico, Croak
The Confidant is held together with delicate threads and secrets.
“And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter— they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
Forgetting isn’t enough. You can paddle away from the memories and think they are gone. But they will keep floating back, again and again and agian. They circle you, like sharks. Until, unless, something, someone? Can do more than just cover the wound. ”
― Sara Zarr, Story of a Girl
“Just for the sake of amusement, ask each passenger to tell you his story, and if you find a single one who hasn’t often cursed his life, who hasn’t told himself he’s the most miserable man in the world, you can throw me overboard head first.”
― Voltaire, Candide
There are few nudities so objectionable as the naked truth.
Agnes Repplier
“Destiny is real. And she’s not mild-mannered. She will come around and hit you in the face and knock you over and before you know what hit you, you’re naked- stripped of everything you thought you knew and everything you thought you didn’t know- and there you are! A bloody nose, bruises all over you, and naked. And it’s the most beautiful thing.”
― C. JoyBell C.
All secrets are deep. All secrets become dark. That’s in the nature of secrets.
Cory Doctorow, Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town, 2005
http://www.quotationspage.com/subjects/secrets/
“A woman once described a friend of hers as being such a keen listener that even the trees leaned toward her, as if they were speaking their innermost secrets into her listening ears. Over the years I’ve envisioned that woman’s silence, a hearing full and open enough that the world told her its stories. The green leaves turned toward her, whispering tales of soft breezes and the murmurs of leaf against leaf.”
― Linda Hogan, Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World
The Queenslander (Brisbane, Qld. : 1866 – 1939), Saturday 23 July 1910
When prodigals return great things are done.
A.A. Dowty
“No matter how many sins you make or how slow you travel back toward God’s valley, you are still way ahead of a person who never made a mistake and doesn’t know what it is like to climb out of a pit of shame and rise above their temptations.”
― Shannon L. Alder
telling doesn’t help me – it helps you. As Wilde says, It is the confession, not the priest, that gives absolution…”
― John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
“Sometimes you have to stick your finger down your throat and vomit up the disgusting insides of the self… sometimes you have to increase the nausea in order to get rid of the disgust…”
― Gail Hareven, The Confessions of Noa Weber: A Novel
music is worthless unless it can make a complete stranger, break down and cry”
~ Frou Frou ‘the dumbing down of love’
“No one is perfect. Everyone has skeletons in their closet, and umm… I believe in letting those skeletons out, the truth will set you free.”
Jayy Von Monroe
I’m a typed director. If I made Cinderella, the audience would immediately be looking for a body in the coach.”
― Alfred Hitchcock
“I’ll tell you a secret about storytelling. Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty… were not perfect in the beginning. It’s only a happy ending on the last page, right? If the princess had everything from the beginning, there wouldn’t be a story. Anyone who is imperfect or incomplete can become the main character in the story.”
― Peach-Pit, Shugo Chara!, Vol. 2: Friends in Need
For you know that I myself am a labyrinth, where one easily gets lost.”
― Charles Perrault
But love is blind and lovers cannot see The pretty follies that themselves commit; For if they could, Cupid himself would blush To see me thus transformed to a boy.
William Shakespeare
There is certainly a satisfaction and dignity to be gained in coming to terms with the mistakes one has made in the course of one’s life”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World
Every man has his dignity. I’m willing to forget mine, but at my own discretion and not when someone else tells me to.
Denis Diderot
Disgrace is like the grain of a tree trunk — time makes it bigger instead of erasing it.
JAPANESE
“It was his subconscious which told him this—that infuriating part of a person’s brain which never responds to interrogation, merely gives little meaningful nudges and then sits humming quietly to itself, saying nothing.”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
“But the greatest love–the love above all loves, Even greater than that of a mother… Is the tender, passionate, undying love, Of one beer drunken slob for another.”
Read more about Funny Drunk Quotes by http://www.poemofquotes.com
Irish love ballad
“This is the true story of my life, as told by a complete liar (me). While that sounds like an honest statement, it’s also a lie. I just can’t help myself. Unless I’m helping myself to seconds at dinner. You see, I can’t possibly be a complete liar, because I’m a rather incomplete person. I look complete on the outside—two arms, legs, ears, eyes, etc—but on the inside I feel half empty at times. If I were a glass of water, I’d make myself thirstier for more than I could supply. I thirst for love like a straw in the Sahara. I hunger for your body like a cannibal in the mountains. Wait, that last bit wasn’t true. I should have said cannibal on a deserted island.”
― Jarod Kintz, Gosh, I probably shouldn’t publish this.
http://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/lawson-henry/the-glass-on-the-bar-0002015
THE OLD PROVERBIAL RECOVERY 