Guest Blogger and long-time Council friend, Bob W. presents Part 19 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 1960’s, the focus on the race to the Moon created a consciousness of the Cosmos beyond Earth and the spawning of a different, more elaborate culture of science fiction genre in the arts, TV and cinema.  Star Trek debuted on TV in 1966, and 2001: A Space Odyssey premiered in 1968.  There were literally over a hundred movies in this genre in that decade, not to mention the dozens of books like A Clockwork Orange, Dune, and Slaughterhouse Five. What set the video material of this time apart from the much less elaborate Buck Rogers of the 1940’s and 50’s was the expansive and intricate detail and mechanisms of the space machines;  they created a deep felt-sense of wonder and awe, at least to me.  They also had profound story lines that fit the Hero’s Journey pattern we have been discussing in connection with our own Journeys to Sobriety.

But, for me, what always struck home in these pieces was the one tagline intro from Star Trek that said that the Enterprise’s five year mission was: “…to boldly go where no man has gone before.”  Many of us have come from a history of Alcoholism that goes back through the generations.  For some of our ancestors, it may have been just an imbedded culture of the time, but the abuse of the myriad of spirits was equally as voluminous and extensive.  So for us to pursue a sober life, free of the compulsion to consume any of those substances, required us to initiate a massive, cultural and spiritual break from a long familial past. We had to boldly go where none before had gone.

In  1995, Pete Hamill, a journalist in New York, published an autobiography of sorts called A Drinking Life: A Memoir.  It is a story of his Irish family drinking history, his own early life consumed with alcohol abuse, and his career associated with a community of people of some renown where the one defining constant was alcohol.  He hit a bottom one day and, recalling his familial history with alcohol, he said to himself: “The madness must stop.  The madness stops here,” and he stopped drinking forever.  It is precisely the recollection I have of that point early on the day after my last consumption of a molecule of alcohol when I made the commitment to stop, finding myself in that same abyss of “pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization.”

It is fascinating to see the science fiction genre over the years in somewhat the same light, where the exploration of the Cosmos beyond the gravity of the Earth is seen as just such a brave, new, exploratory journey into a world of unimaginable wonders alongside our very own higher power….within the Sunlight of the Spirit.

Guest Blogger and long-time Council friend, Bob W. presents Part 18 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.

On August 25, 2017 at approximately 10:00PM, Hurricane Harvey slammed ashore at Rockport, Texas, with sustaining winds of 130mph.  Over the next 4-5 days, it moved inland about 50 miles, then turned back out to the Gulf, meandered just offshore Houston and Bay City and finally came ashore again at Cameron, Louisiana.  Over the period of time that it lingered in or around Houston, it dropped approximately 9 trillion gallons of water in the Greater Houston area, Katy to Bay City, the Woodlands to Clear Lake.  To put this volume of water in perspective, if this volume was in a cylinder one mile square, about the size of the Inner Loop of Houston, the column of water such a cylinder would create would be 8 miles tall, a column reaching a higher point than the peak of Mt Everest.

This truly was a storm for the ages…and in its wake a treasure trove of heroic stories were spawned.  Consumption of alcoholic beverages and addictive substances spiked, and I am sure that there were instances of pretty bad behavior resulting there from. But the dominant behavior patterns seemed much more of the heroic, good-Samaritan type where people of all walks of life reached out to help everyone, thousands of people stranded in muddy, putrid water.

The storm affected everyone. The sight of the man of means struggling to salvage precious possessions wading out of his palatial house in waist-deep, flowing water to get to high ground, only to stop to help an elderly neighbor not able to get there, losing some of his possessions in the process. It was all repeated over and over.

The concept of the hero’s journey played out in everyone’s psyche. For the recovering alcoholic or addict, the ability to use the tools of recovery, the boon of the hero’s journey, allowed him/her to stay in the moment, serenely focused on the needs of those helpless souls who were otherwise stranded.  Service in the highest tradition of the 12^th Step.  What a great gift it all was for all of us….