“Mental Heath is a commitment to reality at all cost.” -M. Scott Peck.
Last year, I visited
Niagara Falls for the first time. It’s serene and it’s beautiful to be totally captivated in their majesty. With the noise of over 2 million litres per second crashing into lake below, and being splashed in the face with mist, all the senses are enlivened.
You feel very alive, there is no question.
But, secondarily, in the wake of the awe there is a feeling of smallness, almost insignificance. Really, for me it is the feeling of healthy respect for the unimaginable power of the falls before me. The knowledge that jumping in the beckoning blueish green and white heaven I see casting a rainbow before me, would kill me with no thought.
As dealt with in Samuel Coleridge’s poem
“Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner”, nature can be seen as indifferent to the safety of my puny body. If I were to jump, I would die. Nothing natural could save me. But, my decision to stay back kept me safe.
The first step in the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous starts with, “Admit that I am powerless to overcome my addiction…” It takes a great deal of humility to truly admit such a thing. It seems contrary a cultural pride all around that espouses a doctrine of man being the god of his own destiny. The concept of surrender in order to conquer is one of the most difficult for me and I think, for many.
Surrender to the truth. “Mental health is a commitment to reality at all cost.” That phrase, has been a shining light to me in my own journey of admitting an addiction and a life of dysfunction, and walking the road to a life of recovery (from addiction to lust, porn and other dysfunctional behaviour and thinking).
I have much I can and have written about this subject and there will be much more in this blog as it is very close to my heart and a big part of who I am, today.
For now, I wanted to share a poem I wrote in high school, my first published poem (in a literary magazine called
The Claremont Review). It is a light-hearted true description of a mostly harmless addiction I had developed at the time. It’s not what years later got me into the doors of recovery meetings, and I’ve since recovered, but this behaviour lasted through high school and well throughout my first year of university, at BYU Hawaii.
Addicted to Trash
By Elias Orrego
I'm addicted to crushed burger boxes,
ketchup-smudged napkins,
pink and blue plastic straws,
soiled beverage containers.
Every step
on my way home from school, I see chip bags,
yogurt tubes, chocolate milk cartons,
empty pudding containers,
foil wrappings, slivered and torn,
spanning the stretch of the sidewalk.
Passerby eye me, the mordification of bending
at every flake of foil, pinch of plastic,
cigarette box, and butt
that doesn't belong in a ditch.
The detour of picking up trash every day,
a lid here,
crumpled newspaper there,
starts out small,
but the next thing I know, the back strains,
arms convulse under weight
and stress to keep holding
flattened gum packs,
styrofoam sandwich containers,
a cold, unwanted crust
that bounces inside a red pizza box,
crinckled chocolate bar wrappings,
the collection of coffe cups, stacked
and scrunched in my shopping bags
that hang from each hand, overflowing
with applesauce cups,
fast food bags, crushed pop cans.
These scraps are my burden
till a trash can grabs my attention,
and offers relief
to hands sore from squeezing.
I just can't help freeing
the natural beauty
of blackberry bushes, towering maples,
the grass patchwork in gravel,
on the side of the highway.
In the ditch, on the road,
in a tree, on a bush.
The supply, always more
than I can consume.
All the bottle tops, shopping bags,
rusted tin cans,
pile up a habit
I seem incapable of dropping!
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