Tuesday, May 9, 2017

What Killing Honeysuckle has to do with Addiction

It's been a while.  Too long.  But I've been busy.

Busy killing invasive Asian Honeysuckle and pulling garlic mustard (also invasive) in the urban woods around my house.  Busy reconnecting with my roots as a farmer's daughter, figuring out how to make clay soil produce food - clay soil in the middle of the city, I might add.  Busy re-discovering wild plants I learned as a child:  Jack-in-the-pulpits, trillium, morel mushrooms, toothwort, pokeberry, wild grapevines and barren strawberries - just to name a few. Busy learning about the struggle of so many who deal with addiction to substances more potent than anything in nature, more dangerous to the brain, more problematic.  Busy reading Wendell Berry, trying to make home beautiful and comfortable, learning to parent teenagers and sending one off to be independent.
In other words, busy living, which is the best kind of busy, because it's not frantic or empty.  It's just a full life, for which I am eternally grateful.

What if, I find myself wondering, what if it's all connected?  What if it's the LOSS of connection that is what we call sin? Is it the loss of connection to God, to creation (our older sister, if St. Francis is to be believed), to each other in community, to ourselves, that leads to addiction?

Of course, once addicted, our beautifully-designed/evolved/created brains take right over. That felt GOOD.  Do it AGAIN.  And we can, because we live in an abundance we didn't work for and cannot earn if we try.  Perhaps, then, loss of connection also leads to forgetting that we are contingent, that we are not owed a living or life.  Perhaps that is why gratitude as a practice is so important to a real, authentic, with-God life.

Anyway, it's good to be back.  I'll try harder.  For a while.


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