As we travel through the rough terrain of the strange land of addiction, we can suffer from compassion burn out, not onIy around our suffering child but also toward all those in our family or close circle of friends with whom we have shared our compassion and love in the past.

I appreciate it when poet Theodore Roethke discovers the spirit of Love in the realm of nature. In this natural epiphany he renews his love and enthusiasm for life.

With great joy, he says:
The Sun! The Sun! and all we can become! And the time is ripe for running to the moon!… My spirit rises with the rising wind; I’m thick with leaves and tender as a dove… I recover my tenderness by long looking. By midnight I love everything alive.”

I hope you can feel his enthusiasm too.

After a good night’s rest, when our day has flowed smoothe and pretty, it is fairly easy to say, “This is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.” But after a full day of fear and stress and disappointment and the hurtful and hateful things that our own child may say to us, it takes freedom, extraordinary spiritual freedom, to say, “By mid- night I love everything alive.” When we say this and feel it , we know we’ve dropped the resentments, the bitterness. We’ve finished with the nightmares. It has been a long hard season of forgiveness but now I am free to love everything alive…”

By midnight the slate is wiped clean. By midnight I’ve dropped my anger, resentments and guilt. By midnight I’m back in touch with the love that lives at the center of the universe.