JB Smiths Blog – Author @ books4free.com

“Nothing to tell now
Let the words be yours, I’m done with mine”

By John Perry Barlow with Bob Weir
Recorded on Ace (Warner Brothers, 1972)
Cora, Wyoming February, 1972

I go months and months without thinking about certain things, including the grateful dead, and then in a wave and a rush, I’ll remember how much I love the music and how much the words can mean to me.

When I wrote the Robert Hunter quote from the song yesterday, it brought back all the thoughts of my divorce, losing my son as a full time father, and the loss of so many loves throughout the last 15 years. Today I woke up with Cassidy running through my mind. God those words are beautiful, so fucking poetic, just humming them brings back such memories. For me, this song brings back my mama’s passing, and the eternity of all life. The hawk I saw circling our limo as we drove to her funeral. Good music can be so personal, it can mean so many things.

Being a christian I believe death is only another passing moment. We will all get there, how we lived, who we helped, who we treated well, who we forgave, is all there is. If christianity didn’t exist we should invent it as the best way of living. I have reawakened to my faith in the last year or so and it’s amazing what I find reading through the pages of the new testament.

How much of the book is there, that we simply do not do? Fasting for instance. In all my life I’ve never known a christian that fasted. It’s prominent, it’s there, it’s in the words and yet I’ve never ever heard the first sermon on it. Also forgiveness. Real forgiveness. Turning the other cheek when someone maliciously, childishly attacks you. I know so many christian values that are spoken about, but barely ever practiced. I guess because it is hard to do.

But for me, in sobriety ever year I learn a little more spiritually and learn that the things I learn are generally good for me. Obedience to God and to spiritual principles that he continually shows me almost always has it’s own inherent rewards. Usually first though, it’s hard as hell to begin a new behavior.

Taking a year off of dating, which was suggested by minister Andy Stanley for a year, long after my sponsor had suggested it for several years, is finally starting to sound like it might have some actual validity. I’ve made nothing but messes of every single relationship I’ve ever been in in my entire life. As the 12 and 12 states and I was moved by the very first time I ever read:

“The primary fact that we fail to recognize  is our total inability to form a true partnership with another human being. Our egomania digs two disastrous pitfalls. (THIS IS THE BEST PART) Either we insist upon dominating the people we know, or we depend upon them far too much. If we lean too heavily on people, they will sooner or later fail us, for they are human, too, and cannot possibly meet our incessant demands. In this way our insecurity grows and festers. When we habitually try to manipulate others to your own willful desires, they revolt, and resist us heavily. Then we develop hurt feelings, a sense of persecution, and a desire to retaliate. As we redouble our efforts at control, and continue to fail, our suffering becomes acute and constant. We have not once sought to be one in a family, to be friend among friends, to be a worker among workers, to be a useful member of society. Always we tried to struggle to the top of the heap or to hide underneath it. The is self centered behavior blocked a partnership relation with any of those about us. Of true brotherhood we had small comprehension.”

page 53 – The 12 Steps and 12 Traditions

Wow, what precision. How can they have mapped us out so effectively?

I guess the only fix is the 12 steps, time and layers of the onion.

-Jared Bryan Smith