Dear Folks, I’m starting this letter on a brilliant cool Saturday night just as the sun is setting in a flawless clear sky. We were beginning to think we’d never see such a day again.
The weather forecasters for the past month have been reduced to telling us every day, day after day, that it will be HHH, humid, hot, and hazy, which is exactly what it’s been. I know — it’s been that way where you are too. It’s been so over the whole country, as far as I can tell.
But it’s especially unfair around here, because we’re not ready for it. HHH happens to us about as frequently as a “blizzard” happens to Arkansas — those blizzards always make me laugh because a few inches of snow that shuts down Arkansas would be just an easy spell between real blizzards to us. Arkansans don’t have an armament of plows and shovels and boots and insulation and storm windows and warm clothes like we do. But we have almost no air conditioners or fans or hot-weather clothes. Ruth and I each have exactly two work outfits that are really cool, and we’ve been getting mighty sick of wearing them. There has been a run on fans in the Upper Valley — they’re out of stock everywhere. People are not attuned to know which stores and movie theaters are air-conditioned so they can go hang out there — it takes awhile to learn these things.
Worst of all, we aren’t mentally prepared, we haven’t got the right habits. We don’t expect paper to curl up and half-dissolve just sitting on a desk. Our normal schedule for carrying the garbage bucket out to the compost pile just doesn’t work when the garbage goes fetid in a matter of hours. We expect to wear clothes more than a few hours before they need washing. We expect deoderant to last all day. We’re not used to sleeping without covers. Our best survival technique here is to keep moving rapidly — it keeps us warm in the winter, and it keeps the bugs off in the summer, and it satisfies our Puritan work ethic, but it’s a killer habit when the weather is HHH. We have these consciences that tell us we’re not pulling our weight, we’re not worthy to be on the planet, if we’re not hard at work all the time. So we overdo in the heat. The Valley has been full of irritable people, including me.
Very slowly I had given up the expectation that the haze will blow away tomorrow and cool Canadian air will blow in. Slowly I had been learning how to adapt to hot weather. Instead of waiting until 10 to go work in the garden, so the air will warm and the dew will evaporate, I’ve learned that I have to be finished with garden work by 10. I’ve been getting up earlier and earlier and going to bed later and later, writing in the mornings and evenings, and bagging off in the middle of the day. Amazing to take a nap or jump in the brook in the middle of the day, day after day after day! What a fight I’ve had with my Puritan conscience about that!
Two days ago, just when I was getting this new behavior down and kind of enjoying being slow and lazy, the haze blew away and cool Canadian air came in. It became normal late-August New England. It went down to 40 and we remembered what it was like to fear for our tomatoes. Now there is our usual fall ground-fog every morning. We wake up shivering and pull on long pants and sweatshirts and make hot tea. Once the fog burns off, we can see long vistas of mountains again (during the worst of the haze we couldn’t even see Mount Ascutney, ten miles away). We can breathe deep draughts of air without inhaling the pollution of the East Coast cities. We can work hard enough to keep our consciences quiet. Today I spent hours, right in the middle of the day, pulling out the neglected weeds in the garden, hauling sheep shit, doing all the chores I haven’t felt like doing for a month, warmed by a steady sun, but cooled by a Canadian breeze.
It feels terrific to be cool again, but already this morning as I went upstairs to find a warmer shirt, I was thinking with nostalgia of how nice it was last week when it was really hot.
The summer is still dry, we still need rain badly, the pond in the sheep pasture has dropped about six feet. But the sun is weakened enough now and the plants in the garden are mature enough with deep enough roots that the water situation is not critical. It’s been the most amazing summer we’ve ever had for corn and tomatoes and melons and squash — all crops that are usually marginal in our climate. We will have a tomato season that lasts a lot longer than three weeks, for a change. It’s been a disaster, though, for the crops we usually grow best — potatoes and cabbage and spinach and peas, which can’t take this heat. And I’ve never seen the bugs so bad. The beans and I have officially lost the war with the bean beetles. The Japanese beetles are out there decimating soybeans even as I write. The potatoes are scabby. There are no usable apples on the trees. However, I have Great Plans for conquering all the pests next year, when I’m permanently home on my farm again.
This month has been a quiet but anxious time for me. I’ve been writing, writing, writing. Sometimes the writing comes easy, sometimes not, lately it’s not been easy, primarily because I’m working flat out on the telecourse book, and its basic shape and format are still eluding me. It’s usually that way at the beginning of a big project — it has to take structure in my mind, so I know where to put all the pieces. Until that happens, the pieces just fly around in my head, getting entangled in one another, and causing me to wake up at night in cold sweats.
There’s an added anxiety because of the schedule. One chapter is due every month for the next year, and any slippage will sabotage the air date for the TV series, which is September 1990 (the book has to done almost a year before the series airs, because of publication and adoption delays). I’ve spent much of this month living not in August 1988 but in October 1989, when the book is due. Doing that is worse than useless, of course — anxiety doesn’t get the book written, only plugging away at it day by day and staying with today. I have an opportunity here for some great Zen discipline (stay in the moment) and some great 12-step recovery (Easy Does It — One Day At A Time).
Speaking of 12-step recovery, I haven’t told you much about Overeaters Anonymous since March, when I first discovered it. It has become a steady, calm, beautiful part of my life. Maybe you’d like to know more about it, now that I know more about it.
There are at least 3 OA meetings every day somewhere in the Valley — I get to about 3 a week. They occur at lunchtime or in the evenings, in various church basements and other public meeting places, and they last exactly one hour. Somewhere between 5 and 40 people usually show up at the meetings I attend, and there must be something like 100 altogether whom I see regularly. A basket is passed around, in which everyone puts 50 cents or a dollar — I think that’s the only source of funds for the whole operation. There are no particular leaders or officers, but there are people in various stages of recovery. The ones who are most advanced take responsibility for the meetings and serve as sponsors to newcomers.
An OA meeting is a bit like a Quaker meeting. It starts with a prayer (God give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference) and a reading of the 12 steps or something else from the OA literature. Then the leader for that meeting (a volunteer each time) shares her story, what it was like to be addicted, how she recovered, how she maintains her program of recovery (I say “she” because about 90% of the attendees are women — in Alcoholics Anonymous I hear that about 75% are men — the two sexes turn to different drugs to blunt their emotions and hide from their lives).
After the leader shares, anyone can talk about anything to assist her own recovery. There’s no “cross-talk” — no conversations, no advice given, no answers back — you only talk about yourself. These sharings tend to be devastatingly honest, often quite moving, sometimes expressing tremendous joy about a step of recovery, sometimes despair about slipping, sometimes frustration or self-questioning or working out something that’s stuck. Everyone is anonymous, nothing get passed on outside of meeting, people learn quickly to drop facades and stop lying and share openly. I usually walk out of meetings feeling tender, emotionally alive, calmed, and inspired.
Going to meetings, I quickly learned, is not enough. You have to work out your own plan, implemented thoughtfully, deliberately, and daily, for how to eat sanely and how to get through times of temptation. More than that, you have to rebuild your whole life around a truly spiritual base, not a rhetorically spiritual one, but one in which, according to step 3, you really have turned your will and life over to the care of a Higher Power. (I have always had a strong spiritual streak, but mostly one of concepts and words; certainly not one in which I surrended control of my will and my life!) The form of spirituality, the name you use for God, like the eating plan, is entirely up to you — OA is maddening about not providing you with diets or churches or answers. If you want a sponsor you have to choose one for yourself. If you want a prayer, you have to find it for yourself.
I have gotten myself not one sponsor but two. I don’t know of anyone else who has done that, but I was attracted to two women in the group, both about my age, both busy professionals like me, both of whom exhibit degrees of recovery that I want to emulate. One is my food sponsor, who helps me work out sane ways of eating (she’s a midwife and nutritionist), the other is my time sponsor, because I recognized that my use of time is as compulsive as my use of food. I have to apply the 12 steps in that arena too (I’m a sugarholic and a workaholic). I call or meet with my sponsors regularly and report what I’ve been eating and how I’ve been spending my time. (“Did you really stop working at 6 pm like you promised?” my time sponsor bugs me. “Why don’t you start going to concerts and plays again? What’s wrong with going swimming in the middle of the afternoon?” She’s a tyrant!)
The spiritual part of the program doesn’t work for me when I try to use the God-language of my childhood, but I can translate it easily into more abstract Buddhism, with which, for some reason, I feel more comfortable. It all adds up to the same thing, rejecting one’s selfishness and ego and self-deceptions and tuning into that Higher Power, which in all traditions is accessible inside oneself and is also much, much greater than oneself. I start every morning with a quiet time now, in which I read the God-language daily reader from OA and the Tao Teh Ching, and I meditate a little, and I set out my food plan and time plan for the day and ask for Higher Power help in achieving it. At night I record how I did and give thanks for the day. However the day turned out, there’s always so much to give thanks for, especially now that I have some real recovery in my life.
I’ve lost about twenty pounds, quite slowly but effortlessly without consciously dieting. I have another twenty to go, but I’m not supposed to think about that, just eat for health every day. I don’t eat sweets at all — they’re like the first drink of the alcoholic to me — but I haven’t forbidden myself anything else. I feel immensely better, physically, emotionally, spiritually. I’m living my life again, flat out, letting myself have all the emotions I have and going right on forward. When I get stuck on a column or the book, when I want to soothe myself by eating everything in sight, when I wake up full of anxiety about October 1989, I now have some constructive things to do (call someone in OA, go to a meeting, read something spiritual, talk to a Higher Power).
Four months ago I would have said all that was impossible. Now it’s possible and beginning to be natural. It seems like a miracle, but it also seems very simple.
It’s amazing that something as powerful as the various 12-step programs can run effectively, for over 50 years now, with no outside funding, no government oversight, no hierarchy, no gurus, no rigid rules, everything entrusted into the hands of certifiably crazy people who have a history of addicted, uncontrollable, self-ruined lives. I’m still trying to figure out how such a thing could exist even for one year, much less bring about miracles in the lives of millions of people year after year. One thing I’m learning, though, is that whatever AA and OA and the like are, they are not something that can be figured out.
It’s time to quit. I have to get going on two columns, today, so as to get a bit ahead so I can go to the Balaton meeting in Hungary two weeks from now.
Love, Dana
