Angels Among Us

Trust yourself: then you will know how to live. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

On September 11, 1984, at the age of thirty, I began my sober journey.

Today’s newsletter is dedicated to Richard.

Easy Does It (EDIT) club; torn down in 2012. Denver, Colorado

The house off 6th & Wadsworth. Denver, Colorado. Peeling blue paint, white trim, surrounded by asphalt for parking, a dilapidated old camper trailer at its edge where Wino Bob lived (unofficially.) Old Dan, now deceased, was the EDIT (Easy Does It) club manager, kindly eyes behind wire-rimmed eyeglasses, balding, soft-spoken, and always a smile for me as I offered him my cup, taken from the collection of member cups on the particle board along the wall, the one with my name and sobriety date on it.

I've seen and met angels wearing the disguise
Of ordinary people leading ordinary lives ~ Tracy Chapman

He’d pour me some coffee, say something pithy, depending on my mood, something like Easy Does It or Live and Let Live, and I’d sashay my way up the stairs, sloshing coffee, to the second-floor meeting where I showed up every day, and sometimes more often, the first few years.

On Sundays, I went to an afternoon meeting, which was not as packed as the ones during the week. 12 step meetings have titles, and this one was no different, though all I can remember is that the word Spiritual was part of it. All meetings have their regulars; there was a core group I could always count on to be there. There’s a kind of comfort in that. I was taught to commit to some meetings and attend regularly; one should be my home group - that was the daily weekday noon meeting, but I went to this one just as regularly. I thought of it as my “spiritual meeting” and was interested in improving my conscious contact with God as I understood God. The Sunday afternoon EDIT meeting core was a group of old timers who seemed wise, and, in the ups and downs of new sobriety, I looked to them to guide me. I was stark raving sober, and it would be that way for the first five years, at least. 

At some point, an old guy (to me, he seemed old; I was in my early thirties and he was probably in his fifties) showed up for the Sunday meeting; he was always dressed in painter’s whites, with paint stains even on his shoes. His hair was iron gray, and he had a handsome, wrinkled face like some men do as they age. 

I didn’t pay much attention to Richard.

“I’m eleven years sober,” he would say in almost every meeting, “And I’m still on the first step.” I wondered how he could still be on the first step after eleven years sober. Personally, I’d finished steps one through nine and was already on ten, eleven, and twelve, the “maintenance steps” they called them. But Richard kept coming. I started seeing him in the weekday noon meetings too, and he always said the same exact thing, “I’m eleven years sober and I’m still on the first step.” Poor guy, I thought.

The old blue house, EDIT, was a second home for me. On the first floor, there were couches and easy chairs, plenty of comfy seating, a coffee bar, and a kitchen table the old guys hunkered down at, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, and unobtrusively helping newcomers like me. If I needed to talk, any of them were available and listened to my drama. Somehow, I didn’t drink. Sometimes, I stayed at EDIT from noon to seven. No more looking for love in all the wrong places. I was home. There was also my sober cohort, a bunch of us who got sober around the same time. 

Scientist John would take me to lunch. “You will always be interesting to men,” he told me and bought me a copy of The Second Sex by Simone Beauvoir that immediately went over my head. A few times, when I was losing my mind, or thought I was, John stayed with me the entire day, took me to lunch, to his place, read psalms from the Bible to me, which was ok with me since he wasn’t a Christian, and told me, “You’re an original thinker.” I wasn’t sure what he meant, but I liked the sound of it.

On Saturdays a group of us, all guys except for me and Lea, went out to lunch after the noon meeting. Scientist John, Joel, Railroad Bill, Chris, Handsome Mike, Charley, Harold, and a few others who came and went. Those men helped save my life and the way they did it was that not one of them ever hit on me. I was an attractive young woman; they were younger, older, and my same age. I needed those lunches. I needed to be treated like a human being, to be seen as something beyond a sex object.

But Richard was an anomaly. I started noticing him around the club. He always pulled up in his painter clothes on a motorcycle a bit too small for him. He smiled often and didn’t say a whole lot. He came and went, somewhat of an apparition. There was a group of us at the noon weekday meetings who all went to Westwood, a restaurant down the street from the club, where we mostly drank coffee and told war stories. Richard never joined us. He just came and went with the putt-putt sound of his bike engine.

One Sunday meeting, I decided to share a dilemma I was having with dating. Three years sober by then, I’d left my then-husband, who was still drinking, and I was committed to not getting into a relationship for at least a year post-divorce. It was suggested not to get into a new relationship during the first year of sobriety or, if you were married when you got sober, not to change relationships during the first year. I’d stayed married for three, had recently separated, and now faced temptation; I was being wooed by a guy and, out of loneliness, went on a few dates with him. I wasn’t really interested, but he was nice and helped assuage my boredom. 

I posed a question to the group: 'How do God and sex intertwine? How do spirituality and sex coexist?' Having been born and raised in extreme fundamentalism and now sober, I had carried the dualistic thinking and fragmented worldview of my upbringing into recovery. I was dead serious.

A tall Ivy-league-looking guy, Steve, approached me right after the meeting and said, “I asked my priest that question.” I have forgotten what he told me about it. I guess the fact I ended up in bed with him later that year tells the story. But this story is about Richard. 

After that same meeting, after I finished chatting with Steve, I walked down the stairs to find Richard at the bottom.

I looked at him, there in his painter's whites, his eyes a startling blue that pierced me, and as he held out his hand to me, I saw him leave his body and God enter. That’s the best I can describe it. The man was gone, and all that was left was spirit.

 “Allow me to introduce myself,” he said. 

That was the beginning of many conversations I had with Richard. Mostly, he listened. Then he’d say something that would bypass my mind and go straight to my body.

I chattered on and on about “relationships” and my vow to wait a year to have another one since I’d left my husband.

Richard’s eyes were endless blue electric magnets. He took a finger and pointed to them, then smiled.

“See these?” he asked. 

I nodded.

“Dime a dozen,” he grinned. “Dime a dozen.

He spoke in parables and told me about the time, terrified, he had to crawl across the Grand Canyon at the age of six. I still haven’t figured out what that one meant. 

Once, he asked me, “What do you want?”

”I want you to be my father,” I said. “I want to sit on your lap.”

”Any man who agrees to be a father to you is doing you a huge disservice.”

Richard never personally indicated a romantic or sexual interest in me.

”Do you want to fuck me?” he might ask. Then, he would laugh and point to an imaginary wristwatch,

“I’ve got five minutes.” 

Richard was teaching me there are ways to violate that have nothing to do with sex. 

Richard had climbed in the Himalayas, lived in Tibet. He said he had invented a basketball machine and was waiting on a patent. Richard often referred to his brother John. I felt like I was in another dimension with Richard. Outside time. When he referred to his brother John, I was pretty sure he meant John the Baptist. 

Once, morbid with guilt, I confessed to him how I’d betrayed my employer; I’d filed an unemployment claim and followed the advice of an old-timer who told me to claim the radio station was an unsafe environment because I didn’t think I could stay on the air and remain sober. I’d begun to regret that decision. Wasn’t it my responsibility to stay sober regardless of the environment? Did I owe them an amend?

Richard looked at me for a good long minute, “Just the fact that you care,” he said. “Just the fact that you care.” That relieved me. Today I find myself in Richard’s shoes quite often when someone in early sobriety shares their heart, and their guilt with me for something they did. I remember Richard, and I get it. They care. That’s a miracle. 

Just the fact that you care.

Richard continued to come and go to the club, claimed he was “still on step one,” and no one seemed to recognize him as the holy man I came to know. They paid him no mind, and a Bible verse I learned in childhood¹ came to me, “The world cannot receive him because it isn’t looking for him and doesn’t recognize him. But you know him because he lives with you now and later will be in you.” 

I remembered the stories I was told as a child that Jesus might knock on our door one day disguised as a beggar or a hired man, but we wouldn’t know him. “For my people are foolish; they know me not.” 

I was in an altered state for much of the time I spent with Richard. Whatever it was, whether he was an angel, as I came to think of him, that walked on earth, riding a motorcycle too small, painting houses for a living, or otherwise, he came from another dimension, and his appearance was no mistake. I was meant to meet him. I was meant to get a glimpse of the consciousness he embodied, and I was especially meant to receive one particular message. One day, Richard looked at me and said, “Kelly, the worst thing anyone ever did to you was they made you doubt yourself.”

The worst thing anyone ever did to you was they made you doubt yourself.

I got frustrated with Richard sometimes. “Why do you always speak in parables?” I asked him, exasperated. “Why are you always on step one?” 

I don’t remember the exact day Richard stopped coming to the EDIT club, just that one day I realized he hadn’t come around in a while. We always met at the club, so I didn’t have a phone number or any way to find him. 

I imagine Richard zipping up on his humble motorcycle today, wearing his splattered painter’s pants and white t-shirt, his blue eyes lit up; how I’d tell him I trust myself now. I get it. Trusting myself was the entire journey, wasn’t it, Richard?

I trust myself now.

He’d just tell me another parable. No chance he’d show me his wings. 

I wish I could thank him for his dime-a-dozen eyes and refusal to play a father to me. 

“Why don’t you ask God to come down and make love to you?” he once said. 

“Richard,” I’d tell him. “God did.” 

---

One of Us

Forty years ago, on September 11, 1984, I got sober. After twenty-four years of sobriety, I drank again. I don’t call it a relapse because the insanity began long before - in the dead of a February night in Alaska - I took that first drink. Relapse can happen in recovery whether or not we end up at the drink. Many don’t make it back.

I’ve heard people say, “If I drank, I wouldn’t make it back,” or “I’d rather shoot myself than take a drink.” But I’m here to tell you that you don’t have to die from alcoholism—whether you’re sober or not. It’s better to pick up a drink than a gun, but the best choice is to live in the solution, one moment at a time. For me, that solution is the 12 steps, but wisdom and truth are found in many forms. Find what works for you.

No one has to die from alcoholism.

Recovery isn’t about accumulating time; it’s about daily practice, constant growth, and embracing life as it comes. It’s about allowing the past to move through you, letting go of resistance, and connecting with the truth of love. Recovery means accepting imperfection and realizing the perfection within it. It means waking up to the beauty and miracle of existence on this incredible planet.

Much like a rocket reaching the moon by constant course corrections, relapse is part of recovery. Despite being off course 97% of the time, studies show that the Apollo rockets still made it to the moon through continuous recalibration. Recovery works the same way.

In 2008, I drank again, but I found my way back two years later. On November 27, 2024, I’ll celebrate fourteen years of renewed sobriety. I’ve grown, my heart has expanded, and my capacity for life has deepened. I am a better surfer. I know how to fail, and I’m learning to fall harder and deeper and still find my feet again; if the ground is gone, I’ve learned to just keep falling. I’ve always wanted to fly, and sometimes -if I put my arms out? - Falling feels like flying.

I’m looking for the next step, the next way forward. I’m reaching. I’m not going to stop.

Thank you, Wendy K, Richard, Gary D and all the recovery angels.

Thank you to the comets who illuminate my way. To you.

You flashes of light.

I love you all.

---

On repeat:

---

One thing:

Be the necessary angel.

Notice, I did not say be a doormat.

Every angel is terrifying, wrote Rilke.

What did he mean?

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels'
hierarchies? and even if one of them
pressed me against his heart: I would be consumed
in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure, and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

When I met Richard, I saw his ego leave his body. When we meet an angel, we meet the absence of ego. There’s nowhere for our projections to land except back in our own egos and bodies. The angel wants nothing from us and sees past our persona to who and what we were made to be. The angel’s gaze is steady; she does not flinch or look away. She sees our true identity and keeps looking until one day, we understand there’s nothing wrong with us, and there never was. ⚡️🌈

'It doesn't happen all at once,' said the Skin Horse. 'You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real, you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.”

― Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit

This week, find three people to help as a silent angel. Follow your heart, take some time each day to get quiet, go within, and connect with your Higher Self or Power. Then, as you go about your day, stay alert—you will recognize the three people who need your help and how you can assist them. Never presume you know how to help. Instead, remember to pause and ask.

It may be a phone call, it could be the opening of a door, a few dollars to someone standing on a corner. It might be your children, a spouse, or a friend.

They are waiting.

I will open up a chat soon where we will talk about our angels. Have you met one?

I am the angel of reality,
Seen for the moment standing in the door…
I am one of you and being one of you
Is being and knowing what I am and know.

~ Wallace Stevens

Shout outs

Speaking of angels, I first found

Asha Nayaswami

on Instagram @innerlife_withasha and was delighted to discover she is here on Substack! Listen: Nice is nice, but truth is power.

Nan Tepper with The Next Write Thing is another angel misfit. I’m new to Substack, and Nan reached out in comments and made me feel welcome. I’m eying her StyleYourStack, and I think you might like it! I love meeting kindred spirits here. Nan and I connected over this piece and her inability to hide her feelings. I wrote about the importance of learning to identify and voice feelings here. If you’re recovering, and we all are, you’ll love her!

Be an angel.

That promised essay about scapegoating and family estrangement? I AM THE GOAT: A Love Story is still looking for a home; it may take a while. I can’t wait for you to read it! If you have 10k subscribers or above and are looking for a guest post, hit me up!

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