A Recovery Blog

This blog is about my continuing recovery from severe mental illness and addiction. I celebrate this recovery by continuing to write, by sharing my music and artwork and by exploring Buddhist and 12 Step ideas and concepts. I claim that the yin/yang symbol is representative of all of us because I have found that even in the midst of acute psychosis there is still sense, method and even a kind of balance. We are more resilient than we think. We can cross beyond the edge of the sane world and return to tell the tale. A deeper kind of balance takes hold when we get honest, when we reach out for help, when we tell our stories.

Thursday, August 4, 2016

Poem - "The Homeless"

The Homeless

You have seen the clouds get dark
Before a thunderstorm.
You have felt the wind pick up
Before the storm.
You have let yourself get wet
With the rain.
You have worried where the lightning will strike.
You have found your shelter, your home,
A safe place to wait the fury out.

Once inside the windows become
Like a movie screen for a spectacular show.
There is so much energy in the air
And you once again feel the delicate
Balance between life and possible death.
You hope that you are safe for now.

Remember, some people have no home
But must wander from place to place
Out in those frequent storms
Out in a circus of danger.
They hold on tight
To their few possessions.
Each day they try to believe
In the kindness of strangers
And count themselves lucky
For a pocketful of change
At the end of the day.

Our passing traumas
Are their daily process
For who knows what awaits
Around the bend?
And how do these men and women recover
When they have no safe places
To wait out the storms of life?

There but for fortune
Go you or I.
Remember to give thanks,
For all our small pleasures
Are huge in the eyes of the homeless.
Kindness must be more than a casual choice.


Make it a way of being.


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