windows

It’s been so long since we could open the windows and leave them that way. It’s been so long with no clear sounds from outside. No birds. No breeze.

This stagnant air is suffocating. This Minnesota winter is long and relentless. I want new air in my home, tinged with warmth…oh, how I want it. I want it so much it hurts. I want to go outside without a coat and walk through the trees and put my fingers to new leaves and feel that little prickle of nature’s energy flowing up my arm, making my eyes wider and brighter.

I want to feel better. It’s so hard to feel better without spring, without the new air, the new grass, the new leaves.

I suppose the human spirit was made to overcome winter.  So, either we do or we don’t. Maybe it’s a choice. So I will stare the stagnant air in the face and defy it. I’m going to throw open all the windows today, and the front door, and then I’m going to laugh in the face of the chill it brings. I can’t breathe, so I’m going to fight and maybe I’ll shiver, but the windows will be open. I hear the birds are back in town.

(Excuse me while I get up to open things right now, actually. I’ll be right back…)

There. I was just too tired of looking out the windows for hope and only finding that the snow is still there, on the other side of sealed windows.

I want it gone. I want out. I want to breathe.

This is what addiction feels like. Stagnant. Trapped. Hopeless. The good things have a hard time flowing in through sealed windows. 

Now, over a year after telling my truth, quitting, I’m breathing new air and sometimes I don’t even know it. Sometimes it still feels like the dead of winter, the sealed windows in me keeping me stuck. But we’ve walked through all four seasons with me, mom, as a sober person. I did quit even though sometimes we’ve been simply getting by, watching the snow pile up, just getting through it. There’s nothing even close to perfect about me, I want you to know that for sure. Yes, it took (and takes) courage but I just need to stop a minute and remind you that I’ve never done it alone…it’s never been about me. It’s about what lies within, the Power that comes freely when surrender hits, when the windows are simply opened.

The warmer months, they did change me. I was no longer walking through life with the obsession, the daily obsession to plan everything around drinking.  The time, the energy, the focus all of  that took, it was gone. Windows were open and in flowed the people and with them, hope. New sounds and sights and smells. Everything cycles through  and around and in us and we were made to overcome, with each other.

It’s hard, isn’t it? Because sometimes it feels like winter will never end, that the sickness won’t lift, that no energy could possibly be found. When it’s like that, instead of waiting, we either fight or we don’t fight and this is all I know for sure since I first opened the windows–it feels much better to fight. Even if all I really did was stop to open the windows, to stare it in the face.

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Miles just came in here, after I opened the windows and finished writing this and his eyes were lighting up and he said, “Mom! I hear the birds! The birds that I hear in the summer!” Then he ran off, to listen some more.  He’s wearing a t-shirt, so he looked a little cold, but that’s okay, because he can hear the birds.

{photo credit}