sub-orbitals

today is my anniversary.  it is the first day of my twenty-eighth year sober, which means i've just completed twenty-seven years clean.  it is a blessing, but it is not a grand thing, except for the short lifespan of the average cocaine/crack addict.  we don't stay around forever, and more and more often, addicts are finding new and creative ways to die.  i am blessed in so many ways.  i am blessed to have gotten sober in 1988.  as opposed to these days, in this decade, in this millennium, when i don't think it's possible to find anyone to give you the principles of recovery that can truly help you stay focused on change and service and love.  i am blessed in that i have so much, an abundance, that has come to my through my God since i got clean.  things that i never even knew were important to me, my children, my family relationships, my writing, my poetry, my thoughts, my intelligence and the wisdom that time is creating from that intelligence plus experience.  i am blessed because i am able to see me and like what i see.  i just had a mess on my kitchen floor.  putting a bottle of water back in (yes, i fill up from the tap and put the bottle in to get cold, like the old days and old ways proscribe) and something knocked over a bottle of flavored creamer which fell into a container full of roast beef and spilled them both to the floor.  almost instantly i went to 'dammitdammitDAMMIT!' and being angry and frustrated, but i quickly got to 'that's why they're called accidents' and cleaned it up.  now, i don't think that's a big deal for most people, but i do have that mentality that things happen and sometimes things make things happen.  this particular time, i just feel like i had something not balanced right and therefore i lost a lid to a creamer that i like and a container that was useful, as the blow from the bottle split the container.  and i have coffee and i have cold water and i'm writing.
so, we begin a journey around the sun again.  a sub-orbit, if you will.  and the original orbit has not been lost, this is an enhancement to the original orbit, as well as the orbit that was in need of enhancing.  life is like that.  there are ellipses that constitute time, not straight lines and not circles.  it wobbles, and it flows, and it halts jerkily and it sometimes swoops and sometimes it crashes and spills its contents and sometimes the mess gets cleaned up and sometimes it doesn't.  but it always goes round, comes round and ends up somewhere with some experience attached to it, if i can dig the lesson.  and that's the beauty of it all.