Don P. from Aurora, CO at the 6th Annual Big Book Weekend at Tanglewood in Camden, ME

This is weren't good, so they got new mattresses, each of them and

in a maximum security 24 hour day surveillance penitentiary.

This is resourceful as hell. OK, just thinking about boggles my mind. These guys are really good. They call it their little weekend vacation to Bermuda for the Bahamas or whatever they're saying. This is resourceful. These are guys who are not stupid.

Shaw Boy gets out in 90 days

and he's gotten very honest. He's been going through

this process, he said. I'm terrified. I've been here 17 years.

All I know how to do is drink, sell dope and do time and I'm terrified.

I remember that

Arrow hardware

and if you can bring that to this,

it's wonderful because now I'm really willing to learn something.

So anyway, they, I believe the power of God went to work. The suggestion here isn't that I believe so much that I believe in God, It was that I believe in the power of God, which makes me an observer to life. I want to see demonstrations of this power. Don't just talk to me. I'm going to watch you for a while. People watch us.

We can sound real good

at the at the podium. People watch us. How do they really live?

And I'm watching it. I didn't see much in the jail that interested me

and I've begun to heal up, which is a very dangerous thing for an alcoholic to do

unaided.

I can go from death to pretty good operation in about 3 days.

OK. Anyway,

they took me in a room with my attorney the day of my trial,

and the District Attorney and he and I had a little discussion and he said we've been talking to the federal people because I owed them five years. They were part of my life,

he said. The the feds and I have agreed. We think you're really sick.

OK,

Fancy. I know that.

So what's new?

He said. We really don't want to have this big trial. It's going to be a messy one.

If you'll plead guilty to a reduced charge, what we'll do, the deal is we'll give you a year 1 1/2 to three-year sentence, suspend that and turn you back over to the feds. And they've agreed to take you to Fort Worth, TX to the federal hospital and fix what's wrong with you.

I signed the papers right there. I'm not stupid.

Two of Maine made that decision.

I was wanting to go anywhere anyone said.

I also had healed up enough to know that if you put me in a hospital with doctors and books, I'll be on the street in six months

because they'll tell me what's wrong with me. They'll tell me about how long it's going to take to fix that, and then they'll give me all the symptoms I have to show to prove I'm getting better. And that's my very best game. I can

play that one on my hands and knees.

Yeah, well, I signed the papers. They kept the deal. They took me into court and judge changed my age to 17 so I could qualify for it. I'm the only one in Colorado that's been convicted of this crime for 25 or 30 years. It just lays there on the books. Give me a 1 1/2 to 3,

turn me over to the feds. And if you know about power, you know in five days I should have been in Fort Worth, TX.

Five days later, I'm in the fish tank in the Colorado State Penitentiary

because the federal man had checked with the hospital, and the hospital said there's nothing we can do for this one anyway,

just get him off the street.

So I went down to Canyon City and I don't believe that God will interrupt anyone else's life to make mine better.

Uses whatever's at hand

and what he had in hand because I had surrendered totally was my solution. I didn't know I was alcoholic. I would not have come looking for AI. Went to any in the federal penitentiary. One meeting, didn't hear a thing. I identified with because I'm not a drug addict.

Just looked like that. Didn't hear a thing

so I was taken where you could come and find me.

Alcoholics Anonymous did not get me sober.

God got me sober, then brought me to Alcoholics Anonymous

because just plain sobriety is not adequate. Brought me here so I could learn how as an active, as an alcoholic, how to become useful and purposeful and live a life that would really mean something. Everybody I've ever talked to, ever,

at the bottom of their heart, just wants their life to mean something somewhere along the way,

and that's what we tap here.

The great promise of Alcoholics Anonymous is that you can become useful.

No matter how far down the scale you've gone, you can be useful. One of my favorite stories is from old Jack Brennan. He's long dead now. Jack was a wheel man for the New York mob. He got fired.

Well, Jack drank too much

and

he'd be in a blackout and they'd go rob some things and then he'd call the next morning and we'll know. Sick guy. Did we have fun last night? Would we do? The boy says. You make us really nervous, Jack. You're a good driver, but goodbye.

And in his drinking, he

he was a violent man. His wife called the cops one time. Six of them drugged him out of his apartment and took him to jail. And he developed a free flowing resentment for the New York Police Department.

And every time he drank, he would find six of them and see how many of he could whip.

So by the time he got to a A, Jack only had one eye left.

He he talked funny 'cause he his mouth had been beat up and shoot his tongue so bad he couldn't hardly talk.

Was in a tenement downtown New York, actually an empty building

and God's got a sense of humor.

Jack is an Irish Catholic drunk and they sent a little Jewish fell out to pick him up a 12 step call.

Gentle, sweet little Jewish Fell

who became his sponsor

and Jack is said at the time he couldn't use utensils, he couldn't tie his own shoes. He really was a mess.

It's been around a for about 6 months and his sponsor kept telling you're really important, Jack, we need you here, you're really important. You said six months. He was tying his shoes in the meeting room,

the old Sobriety and Beyond group.

They made him angry, so he went and complained about it, which I heartily recommend. If you do something your sponsor tells you and you don't get the results you think you ought to get, go bitch about it. It's wonderful.

How do you, how could I be important? He said. Oh, Jack, you have no idea how important you've been to this group.

When new people come here, we sit them next to you and we tell them you keep drinking. That's what you're going to be like.

I

This is absolute truth.

Everyone is as important as everyone,

and sometimes my only purpose in life is to simply be in the room.

Because if I am in the room, the person who thinks they're alone can't think that it makes a lie out of it. There's somebody else here

and other days I'm to climb to the mountaintop

and I don't want to be up there,

but that's the job that I get assigned today. Everybody here is useful. You're so important.

So important

somebody can hear you that can't hear me.

But it's mainly we're just here together.

It was in the heart of Heart Mountains in Germany.

We're abandoned robbers together, That's what it's about. No more complicated than that, really.

Anyway,

I was taken where I had the opportunity

to hear what you had to say. I truly believe I was already spiritually awake when I got here, or I wouldn't have heard it. I believe anybody here today is already awakened spiritually. I wouldn't be here. You'd be doing something else. May not know what to do with it, but we're awake. Isn't that lovely?

And Smith gave us a guide for that Bill stole it and put it in the big book. Doctor Bob's wife.

We must walk day by day with a new person.

We're going to wake them up

and we are responsible if we wake them up to walk with them until they learn how to walk this way. This is a very scary way of life if you're self-centered and you suddenly stop being self-centered.

I don't know what to do here. I'm going to bungle this job.

My first inclination always after I woke up and with people I work with, is to save the world.

I mean, I feel that much power. I can do that.

And you got to hold them back. Just give them a little part of the world to work on for a while.

A Home group

let them have the new people as long as want to use it around to make sure they don't hurt them too bad.

But but I was taken down there and my cellmate Jim, as we were fish tank is A

at that time, it was a four week orientation where you're isolated from the rest of the community while they thump you and bump you and test you and decide where they're going to put you to work and teach you how to live in the community you're about to get into. Because if you don't learn that real quick, you may not live through the deal you got. You got an old. There's protocols in whatever community you live in, and this one has serious consequences

and all that's going on, well, in the third week,

I can still hear it, the guard said. You people will come down and you will listen.

No clues what's going on. Social calendar was not full, so

Jim and I went on down and I did the most important thing I've ever done in my life. Listen,

there were three of them in prison uniforms with numbers on their chest.

Now, I love drama. While it doesn't define alcoholism, I love drama. So let me throw some drama in. My state of being at that time was a willingness to do anything and listen to anything,

but also is fully aware now because I'm conscious. I'm almost 12 1/2 months sober.

On my own efforts, I have reduced myself to a number. I no longer qualified as a human being. I don't even have a name. I'm a number. I was 38984 and I was living in a cage with another number

who was unfit for human consumption and this was just something we knew. No guilt trip, no heavy duty deal. I was in the right place and I knew I was right where I was supposed to be,

and these three guys came in. Ugly little man.

Except for Bruce. Bruce was really kind of cute. He really was

tall, handsome young man just filled with himself. But Doc was ugly, nasty looking little man look like a convict.

My name is Doc. He says I'm an alcoholic and that means that I'm powerless over alcohol and guards and drugs and all of the other circumstances of my life, and my life has become unmanageable.

And if any of you smart bastards think you can still manage your life, look at the reward estate just gave you for the nifty job you've been doing.

Your very best thinking got you the penitentiary. You're not doing too good, are you?

I believe the truth without love is cruelty,

and confrontation without a real answer is brutality.

But they loved us, and they had a real message, and so they could use the truth. Because the truth will set you free.

Piss you off first, but it'll set you free.

And they followed it up. That would be brutality if they hadn't followed it up. And Doc followed it up. With this, he says, we can show you a new way of thinking.

We can show you how to learn to live a way of life that will make sense to you.

And I got my first new idea. I've been trying to live my life. So it made sense to you. My life never made sense to anybody.

Today my life's sake makes sense to me and it still doesn't make sense to a whole lot of people. But I much don't care

when you put bread on my table. Then you can tell me how to live my life.

It doesn't make sense to a lot of people because I live

in absolute reliance upon guidance and direction from God. I know I'm going to get it. I also know I'm not always going to follow it.

I don't know what the consequences of that will be. And it'll be severe enough to bring me back in line, but not severe enough to kill me. There's a price to pay for everything. Freedom has a price, a big price.

If you want to be free, you have to give up whatever it is you want.

Then you're free, whatever it is you're attached to.

When I needed a house, a home, I got a chicken coop.

When I desperately wanted to be a family man in a home, I got an 8 by 10 cage and my children lived with a deputy sheriff of the Denver Sheriff's Office instead of with me since I just don't care anymore. I've been living in the same house with the same woman for 26 years

and I'm a great grandfather.

I am a great grandfather, but I'm also a great grandfather.

Oh, I'm a wonderful grandfather. I know what the role is.

Fearful.

One of you guys talked about magic.

I do magic,

little ones.

In fact, my granddaughter Gianna is learning magic. She thinks that's great. You know how you do that? You take a quarter and it's gone, and then all of a sudden it's behind their ear.

Oh, how'd you do that, Grandpa? I don't know.

And you do it over and over and over again until they catch you at it.

And then, if you like me, you've already got a second way to do it when they think they caught you at it that didn't where it is at all. Magic is about misdirection,

and I believe in magic

because it's fun. One of the funniest acts I have ever seen was a magician that screwed up everything he did.

Didn't get a single one of them right.

Anyway,

they went through a number of things that were just meant to plant some seeds

if we wanted what they had. They invited us to come to their 12 step study school on Saturday.

I hadn't been invited anywhere for a long time.

Jim and I talked. Now understand Jim and I had an interesting relationship. We were cellmates. I was doing a 1 1/2 to 3 for a crime I had committed. Jim was doing a three to five for a crime he couldn't remember

in a blackout, driving a car. He killed some people.

He was not a criminal in the same sense of the word I was,

and he didn't know why he was there. No matter what they told him, he didn't know

he'd done what I'd always been terrified, maybe killed somebody.

So I had a feel for Jim.

I didn't know till much later what it was I was experiencing compassion. I didn't even know it. Most of us wouldn't know the good things if they hit us in the face

until later. Somebody has to describe what that is. It was an empathy there.

I was actually identifying with another human being.

Big, big thing. That's what our whole basis in our program is, to get an identification first. Until that happens, very little else can be done,

so the identification can't be in drama. Bruce became one of my early sponsors. He was doing a natural life sentence for a double murder he committed one morning in the middle of an alcoholic rage in a stick up.

I've never done anything like that. I'm a Sissy bandit.

I like to work with paper and with this thing.

Even today, I still do the same thing. I was in

Virginia last weekend. The young fellow showed up with great blue suit and gold everywhere and this gorgeous white Derby.

It's now in my house.

He was wearing my hat

and all I had to do was give him enough time to become aware of that

and he gave me the hat.

Some things don't change.

We've made a deal.

He is a black. Black

and he came over Sunday morning with the white hat for me, wearing a white suit covered with gold and a Black Hat.

So we made a deal.

We're playing together. I learned how to play with you. I said here's the deal, because these little black girlfriend was there. I said next time I come in, I will wear a black suit and the white Derby with the little feather in it. And you wear this white outfit with the Black Hat, and we'll walk down Madison Street with me between the two of you, and we'll make a Oreo sandwich.

Cracked up.

He's in the midst of God's work. They're trying to get a club started in the worst part of Richmond, VA,

where black and white don't matter, where Alcoholics help each other. And there it's a mission. And they're really working hard on this. And their bravery just tickled me to death. They're being very brave because they're meeting resistance everywhere and it just doesn't bother them a bit. They just want to know, how do we get past this one? How do we do this?

So

every time I wear that hat, I will tell that story

so that you will understand. This is about working with each other

and making play out of it while we do it. This is way too serious to get serious about it. It's only life or death. Lighten up.

But when I started the journey, I was just a number in a cage

right where I was supposed to be, and they invited us to the 12 step study school and since it was the only invitation I had, that's where I went. When life gets real simple, that's how it works. What should I do today?

What's in front of you? What are your options?

Which job should I take first? One that'll pay you,

but it isn't enough? Of course not. I know clearly when I sponsor you that you are destined to be the CEO of General Motors,

but you might want to learn to work before you get there.

Just get a job. That's that's what Bruce said. He says he gave me two things that you'll enjoy. So are you tired of getting busted? I said yeah. He said want to quit going where there's cops.

That's pretty simple. We discussed where they show up.

And if I avoid those places, they probably won't bother me. And,

and it's true, they haven't for quite a while, he said, you want money? I said, yeah. I said well I'm going to get a job,

and once you get it, show up for it on time.

While you're there, you might even want to consider doing some work.

And if you'll do all of that at the end of a particular period of time, they'll give you money

and it'll never be enough.

Always be enough.

Thank God for that kind of simplicity because I was burned to a crisp

thought I had to do this intellectually and do it right and be precise. I don't ever made it,

but they were very precise what they'd invited us to the 12 step study school. We were not allowed to be members of Alcoholics Anonymous and go to the real meeting on Friday night until we completed a five week intensive walk through the book Alcoholics Anonymous

every Saturday. Every Sunday afternoon we give up our yard privileges and our movies

of that five weeks

and spent three to four hours Saturday and Sunday up in this school and the first thing they said when we got there was you new guys for the next 5 weeks have nothing to say. If you know anything at all, you wouldn't be here.

OK,

we all work in addition room. New people need to talk a lot, you know,

They just didn't want to hear that crap.

They would talk to us after the school

and we would talk to each other down there. In addition,

we weren't allowed to talk. We were supposed to listen

and they just read this book to us. We kind of do what I'm doing here,

sharing their experience of it with it, showing us where to find it,

guiding us slowly through. Because this is a process of awakening, becoming conscious of getting rid of things. This is not a process of acquiring anything

for me, it's been a process of getting rid of things. The more I get rid of the more I understand I already have everything I need

and most of what I want.

I'm in a terrible time right now.

I can't give things away fast enough to clear out my office.

We've been working at it, my wife and I. We finally got rid of all of our kids.

We tried throwing them out and that didn't work.

We tried letting them move out on their own. That didn't work. They kept moving back.

We finally got them married off

our oldest daughter. Just found a rich nice guy.

I love him.

Oh yeah,

she now I moved. She took most of her stuff with her, which is a good sign. She doesn't plan to come back.

So we got to finish our basement.

Now they can't come back.

I was taught 1st about what is alcoholism?

I truly believe my main job as a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, and particularly newer people, is to help you find out.

Do you have this?

And the only way I can do that is to share my stories and their stories. There's a lot of stories in here. This whole first part of this book is stories about Alcoholics and how they discovered they were.

This is for the new people mainly. I'm going to give you some good news here. Over on In the Doctor's Opinion

in the second, third, and 4th edition. That's on Roman numeral page 28. In the 1st edition is page one.

Why we changed it? But we did.

Doc Silk was talking about Alcoholics, not on the bottom of that page. He has described the different kinds of Alcoholics, personality types. Alcoholism has

some symptoms, but there's different personalities, he said. All these and many others have one symptom in common.

They cannot start drinking without developing the phenomenon of craving.

This phenomenon, as we have suggested, may be the manifestation of an allergy

which differences H these people and sets them apart as a distinct entity.

I've always thought I'm different,

I said to Bruce. I feel different, he said. That's because you're different.

Here's how I'm different.

I am set apart. I'm different than my mother

in a very real way, but I'm not alone in that difference because you're different the same way.

What happens to you after the first drink?

Yeah,

intense enough that you do.

Ah, that's pretty intense.

Me too. I lose count after one.

I drink until I don't need to drink anymore, which may be weeks, it may be overnight

here. So after the first drink, what happens to me is the same thing that happens to you the second drink.

That's alcoholism.

What happens to me after the first drink is the second drink.

Well, I don't have any choice in that matter and it may not occur this afternoon, but it will occur in a very short period of time and following that will become, well Bill calls us all spray drinkers. I will drink until that condition is no longer present

and I'll stop for a while and wonder what the hell happened. I'm never going to do that again.

And I lock on all the drama so I don't do that again. But I go have another drink.

Somebody will say to me, don't you see what you're doing to yourself? Yeah. How do I not do that? Don't you see what you're doing to your family? Oh, yeah, that hurts about. I better have a drink.

An allergy is worth thinking about. If I were allergic to tomatoes, for instance, and I ate tomatoes, I'd break out with an itch.

It's a definable symptom

if I if this is true and it's like an allergy when I take a drink, what happens? Well, I break out in an itch for another drink.

Describable.

If I have this, it only happens to Alcoholics and we're going to be different than anybody else or whatever treatments available for other people that may also have emotional problems because that goes along with alcoholism. Probably won't work for me.

19 years old, in therapy. They used a very valid technique to help me get over my anger toward my dad.

I had one of those mixed things. I love my dad dearly and I hoped he'd die on his trips and never come home all the same time. Just very confusing. What we did was put up a punching bag and then pick your dad's face there and then punch it. It's supposed to help me express my anger.

I got involved in it. I really like this

express hell this gives me.

That won't work for me.

Standard measures won't work for me. If they had psychiatry and church and all of that would have worked for me. But we never addressed my problem.

Do you feel kind of set apart once in a while?

Yeah, I'm talking to him because I found him walking on the street in Camden, literally just there he was,

and Brian seemed to know him. Brian's a very astute man. He stopped him.

Very compassionate.

OK, I'll get you later.

Well, the reason you feel different is because you're different.

And I'm going to give you some really good news here.

It has never been, by any treatment with which we are familiar, permanently eradicated.

The only relief we have to suggest is entire abstinence. If you have this disease, the best news I have for you is you are doomed.

And that's really good news. There's no treatment for this. Don't waste your time.

The only solution to this problem is the consciousness and the presence of God.

A spiritual answer, the only thing we found that works. However, you can see that so isn't that good news? No,

because I'm either mad at God, don't believe her God, or in terrifying God. I've got all these images as to what God is standing away. Am I ever having a relationship?

How many of you along the way picked up? If you thought it, you've already done it.

And about the time they told me that was about the time I was thinking

it's already too late.

My

Spirit knows about love deep within every man, woman and child is the fundamental idea of God.

And the stuff I'm hearing, well, they're teaching it to me or not. What I'm hearing is

he's going to kick your ass one of these days.

And why? Because of who you are.

That's the message that I got, not what it was being put out. I am by nature this way. And this is the way that the world says you're going to be punished forevermore.

Well, screw it,

why bother? I can't. How can I have a relationship with something I'm afraid of or can't trust?

And we face all that when we come to here. And my sponsors are very simple with that, very clear with that. He asked me one day

described to me God as you understanding

and I started talking about Santa Claus because that was that was kind of my you know, what's he going to do for me?

My real attitude when we got down to it was God created the heaven and the earth in six days and on the 7th he rested. As far as I was concerned, he was still resting.

My basic conception is that God is out here somewhere,

unreachable by me,

judgmental,

unknowable.

But I was going through a new experience because what I came here for, as I said, wasn't sobriety. I came here to be changed.

And here's Bruce, a man who

had killed some people in a shootout on the street in a violent alcoholic rage

and I couldn't identify with, but he talked about the morning he did that.

He said. I woke up that morning and he was 17 years old, feeling that nobody cared whether I lived or died.

Complete failure

and the pain of that was the greatest that I started drinking to kill the pain because it always had before.

But this morning, it didn't kill the pain, it intensified the pain.

And that kind of pain is also called rage.

There is no honest response to being outcast beyond rage. The Spirit knows I'm as good as you are and as bad as I am. I'm as good as you are, as bad as I am. I belong here,

so I'm outraged

and in that rage, she said School, I'm just going to go get mine and went down to Robin Jewelry store. And in the middle of that, the police would call and then a shootout. He killed some people on the street.

The man telling me the story was not capable of committing the act and I knew that. I've been watching him.

People who watch us, I've been watching him.

I came here a complete cynic.

I am now a healthy skeptic.

Oh yeah, I'll believe anything you tell me. What I believe is that you really believe that whatever world you're living in,

that's fine with me.

Roy Nichols, one of my other one of the other guys was a stick up man. I'd like to take a gun and go rob places. And he didn't do it for the money either.

He liked to rob supermarkets

because there were two adrenaline rushes. I mean, in a bank, you hit one teller and you scoop. He's going down line by line by line, and every one of them puts him at greater and greater risk. And he liked the charge. What he really liked was the look on your face when he put a gun to your head.

That's what he really liked.

Man telling me the story was incapable of committing that act, and I could see it. That's why I think I was already awake. I could see it.

Phil Gutierrez, who is to this day in my heart, one of my heroes.

Phil came from Guam.

Phil looked like a Chinese pirate captain.

Yeah, and when he smiled it was terrifying.

And Phil smiled a lot.

Phil was in the penitentiary because when he was 17 they kicked him off of Guam because he was too violent.

When Phil drank, he got really violent sending the family in Denver. Several years later they wanted to send him back to Guam and Guam wouldn't take him. So they put him in a penitentiary because on his last drunk he threw some people out of a three story window.

It's kind of fellow skill was

he came to me one day,

he said. I just realized something.

I've been in this penitentiary for seven years and you're the first person I've ever sponsored. You will stay sober

and I lived up on the 4th tier

of court. Whatever Phil wants, Phil gets.

Phil Gutierrez was the softest, kindest, most loving human being I have yet to me taught me how to touch physically in a penitentiary and no one ever questioned it. With film,

somehow even the worst of the worst understood what Phil was doing.

We need touched.

The great Master knew that, and something that we do intuitively here,

he'd be walking along the road and come on, some guy who was sitting by the side of the road all crippled up and blind and was running sores.

And the guy thought that he was alone because he had running sores and was blind and crippled. The master knew that he had those because he thought he was alone.

And so the first thing he did, the way I read it, is he touched it

and said, anybody home,

That simple touch makes a lie out of I'm alone. Whether you like it or not, it doesn't matter. It's now alive. There is something else here.

And what do we do when they come here? We shake their hand, we pat them on the shoulder. We touch them. We move them around so they're not alone anymore. We exhibit that sense of you are here and you are important.

Then he would say to him, you know, you don't have to do this anymore.

They didn't know that.

I didn't know that when you told me that.

And he said it was such conviction

that you got their attention and he would ask him you won't get up

and he'd wait. And that's what we're supposed to do. First of all, do you want to stop drinking? If you don't see me later, I'll wait.

Do you wanna get up and say? And if they said, well, yeah, they always did, because now they're not alone anymore, he'd say, OK, here comes the magic

Europe.

Oh, OK, with such conviction that they can get up.

Know what we do?

You don't have to drink anymore. Would you like to stop? OK, if you would let me give you the secret. You ready? Don't drink.

Oh, OK. But now how do I do that on continuous basis? I'll make that decision right now.

That's cool. How do I not do that? Well, that's what we can show you.

Once I fully understood that I could not not drink.

I've had a drink

that weird

since I understand I cannot not drink.

I don't drink.

I love it. I've got a warped mind and it says that's good,

I can't use that. Did you get it?

OK, now that you can no longer not drink, you don't ever have to drink again.

Isn't that fun?

So I'm doomed.

I came to believe that there was a power greater than myself because I watched it walk.

His name was Bruce and Roy and Phil. There were a couple other guys. We had a group of about 100 and it's very clear to me that maybe 10 or 15 of them meant business,

but that 10 or 15 walked this way

and I watched them.

Our 12 step study school was one of 23 self help groups in the penitentiary at that time. This is during the phase when the convicts ran the prisons

and we had our Saturday and Sunday afternoon room and it was really important

and I watched Bruce display a characteristic that I wished I'd have had at one time. I saw him display and and live out real courage,

one of the other groups that decided they wanted our room and they prison politicians are pretty good. They'd convince the associate warden of treatment that what we were doing was pretty meaningless, that they should give them our room.

I've never seen Bruce upset by anything. But the word came that we this was our last meeting, that it was over. And I lost his feathers. You ever watch a male bird?

Feathers plumed up and he said I'll take care of this in a tone of voice that was just scary, stomped out of there down the steps around the midway. He's headed for the Associate Warden of treatments office, puffed out,

and I'm thinking he's going to the hole.

You don't stomp into the associate warden treatments office and take care of anything. Not if you learn a number.

We're not gonna see Bruce for several weeks.

I don't know.

Period of time passed and he came back and the feathers were all in place and so was our school.

What I saw was real courage

now. If he left it alone for selfish reasons, he'd had the weekends free. Now he could have done whatever he wanted. He didn't do this for him, he did it for us.

He put his own life in jeopardy for us. That's real. That's what they give medals for.

That's genuine courage. And you did it because he was a spiritual being and this had to be done

for us.

So I began to see some of the things that I wished I could be.

And you had already promised. We can show you how to do this

today. I'm a man of great courage

and there's no ego in that.

I'm on God's business and I'll do whatever is required of me, which is generally just show up

and don't eat too much

and only piss off half the room.

You know?

Courage is the ability to let go of the familiar.

OK, Yeah. Write that one down. I stole it. You can write that one down. I got that from someone else, so don't give credit here.