Guest Blogger and long-time Council friend, Bob W. presents Part 23 of a series dealing with Alcoholism and Addiction from a Mystical, Mythological Perspective, reflecting Bob’s scholarly work as a Ph.D. in mythological studies.

In the beginning of Herman Melville’s classic, Moby-Dick, Ishmael is in an aimless, anxiety-ridden state and decides to go to sea on a whaling vessel out of Nantucket. He befriends a Polynesian harpooner, Queequeg, who possesses enormous strength and ability and a simple but poignant view of life. Together they choose to sail on the Pequod, a classic and strangely adorned whaling craft. The name, Pequod, is from an actual tribe of “celebrated Massachusetts Indians,” a tribe that was particularly aggressive, and which the Massachusetts Bay Colony tried to eradicate in 1537 in the first instance of genocide in the Old World’s colonization of the Americas.

Melville’s tale is enormously rich with analogous and symbolic imagery and character development.  The white whale Moby Dick; the Pequod’s Captain Ahab and the Mates, Starbuck, Stubb and Flask; the native Harpooners Queequeg, Tastigo, and Dragoo; and the various other seamen form a marvelous ecosystem of characters operating in an unusual aggregation of events.  The central story is that Ahab, having been seriously maimed by the albino white whale known as Moby Dick, has become obsessed with the need to hunt and kill the animal to validate his own existence as a whaling captain extraordinaire.  He hijacks the Pequod from its normal commercial whaling mission and pursues Moby Dick around the known oceanic world of the time, only to be killed himself along with most of this men, and the Pequod sunk, in the final confrontation with the whale.

The story is told in the first person, with Ishmael as the narrator.  In effect, it is his journey that provides a wonderful vision for us…through the terrors of the whaling excursions and the final battles with Moby Dick to the miracle of his sole survival. His decision to go to sea is the symbolic initiation of the process of recovery. His experiences in the interactions with the Pequod crew, in the hunting and killing of whales, and in the horrific final battles with Moby Dick parallel our own journeys though the early process of recovery. The story might also be seen, perhaps, as a Melvillian exposition of the world of 19^th century commercialism run amok…in the slaughter and pillage of such magnificent creatures as whales.

Ishmael’s survival, the sole survivor of the disastrous final battle with Moby Dick, is a great culmination to the story, even to the extent that he is the only one to survive, the only one to tell the tale. He has survived, coming back to tell the story, to bear witness to the world of the terrors of rampant commercialism.  For us, the parallel is our survival to tell the story of our lives in our disease.  There is some belief that much of this book, Melville’s story, is based on Melville’s own life, on his life and beliefs.  That he may be Ishmael and that the story is Ishmael surviving to tell his story is the ultimate image for all of us.  It tells all of us that, in our search for a life in Sobriety, the finality must always be the complete embrace of the 12^th Step, that of passing on the Story.

Guest Blogger and long-time Council friend, Bob W. presents Part 22 of a series dealing with Alcoholism and Addiction from a Mystical, Mythological Perspective, reflecting Bob’s scholarly work as a Ph.D. in mythological studies.

The June 30, 2014 cover story of Sports Illustrated was about the Houston Astros. The headline read: “Baseball’s Great Experiment – Your 2017 World Series Champs….An Unprecedented Look at How a Franchise is Going Beyond Moneyball to Build the Next Great Thing.”  The Astros were in last place at the time and had lost an average of 108 games in each of the previous three seasons.

What transpired in the following two seasons was a journey to renewal that is almost unheard of in today’s big money sports.  After compiling a record of 101 regular season wins in 2017, they beat such iconic teams as the Red Sox, the Yankees, and the Dodgers throughout the Playoffs to become the 2017 World Series Champions, their first successful championship.

Those of us with histories and struggles with addictions can see the beauty of such achievements, winning against all odds, as we do in recovery.  For us, the chances of an addict fully steeped in his/her addiction achieving long term recovery is less than 10% by various surveys.  Living with the Astros in Houston in the 2017 season, on top of its previous ones, put all of us front and center in an almost equally improbably experience.

The 2017 Astros were mostly a team of upstarts playing for their first Major League Baseball Club, individuals who marshaled a unified team spirit that seemed unbeatable in all the most critical games.  Their enthusiasm for the team, for each game and for each other was infectious. In the midst of the season, Hurricane Harvey devastated Houston and took everyone’s attention away to more critical things.  The players rose to the occasion and were a big part of various recovery efforts, so that as things settled down the City came back to them with a massively renewed spirit.  Success on the baseball field became as much a signal of a never-say-die spirit as was each and every citizen’s recovery from the flooding.

As John Sexton chronicled about baseball in his aforementioned book, there were dozens of individual and collective stories of heroism on the ball field as there were in the City’s recovery efforts in the waning months of the season…enough for all of us to see the heroism of ourselves and our fellows in the recovery from addictions.  For this truly was another Journey of the Ages.

In the final game against the Dodgers on Nov 1, as the innings wore on, you could see the light brightening in the Houston faces, just as it seemed to fade in those of L.A.  While those of us in addiction recovery can never achieve an ultimate victory such as did the Astros over their 2017 opponents, the process of continuingly experiencing the emerging lightness of being with which our sober living provides us contains at least as much joy and happiness.