Over the River and Through the Woods

I have always loved the woods. When I consider the song – which first showed up as a poem on our cultural landscape – OVER THE RIVER AND THROUGH THE WOODS, I am glad to sing to GRANDMOTHER’S HOUSE WE GO. But, by the age of 7 I had no more grandmothers. I think from that point on I was GOOD WITH just getting through to the woods. And then, just staying there.

The woods are “lovely, dark, and deep” to quote our dear Native Son Robert Frost. But, the promises I have to keep are for my own soul-growth and stability; especially, growing up in a wildly dysfunctional and often unsafe household. The woods have been a part of my ongoing healing into being human. But, there has been another – a verbal – form of solace.

I have been attending ACOA (Adult Children of Alcoholics) meetings since 1987, when Glinda and I started going to the meetings at Our Lady of Good Counsel in Southampton, PA. We really found a home there and began the process of making sense of where we had been in our respective families of origin. While we have always valued and availed ourselves to private and couples counseling, there is a COMMUNAL feel to ACOA that we just loved. The group provided an assurance that others were equally as besot with bizarre dynamics in their “home nest”.

I had fallen away from attending regularly, but this past year I gave myself the gift of attending the virtual meeting at Chapel Hill (Chapel Hill ACOA) during my lunchbreaks. The stability of sitting knee to knee (albeit virtually) with other fragile beings making there way through the tundra of family craziness has been so welcomed.

It was and is an ongoing reminder that we can just live our lives and not examine them at all. But, we can also, climb up to a vantage point and look down on our lives and sort out what we see and think and feel with other people on the same journey. Fellow Travelers, as we say. It has and still does MAKE ALL THE DIFFERENCE.

How find ye time – and where in your life – to get a view on your living and make some acknowledgements and rearrangements of who you are becoming? Inevitably we get to say with Frost, “WHOSE WOODS THESE ARE, I THINK I KNOW….”