Redemption Song

¡Hola! Everybody...
I usually post this around this time of year...it's a Thanksgiving tradition of sorts.

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-=[ Awakenings ]=-

My life is my message

The cliché that life is stranger than fiction is true enough. I guess that’s why they are clichés -- they are true, if nothing else. And believe me, my life has been pretty strange.

Thanksgiving Day has its own personal meaning, as I’m sure it does for everyone. Actually, Thanksgiving Day has layers of meaning. First, there is the “we’re thankful for the help you gave us, but we killed all your people and took your land” meaning, and we should never forget that...

On another level, people of Puerto Rican descent have traditionally taken US holidays and used them as opportunities to express their own cultural identity. For example, Puerto Ricans will eschew the traditional holiday fare of turkey and potatoes and substitute lechon and pasteles, Puerto Rican culinary staples. If we do cook turkey, we cook “pavo-chon,” a turkey prepared in a manner that makes it taste like lechon (pork suckling). Therefore, Puerto Ricans subvert Thanksgiving and give it our own meaning. And humans that’s what we do best, we create meaning.

Thanksgiving Day is also now primarily identified as a secular all inclusive day of expressing ones appreciation for life and having gratitude for the things we need to live a happy and healthy life. As a Latino the cultural values of extended family ties and Thanksgiving evoke childhood memories of large (and totally insane!) family get-togethers.

However, for me Thanksgiving holds its most significant meaning on a very personal level. You see, it was around this time nineteen years ago that I experienced the first of a series of “spiritual awakenings” that would change my life. The exact date is November 26, 1990 and this

year it happens to fall on Thanksgiving Day. Shortly before then, on a cold, drizzly November day, I was so overcome with despair that I attempted suicide. It’s actually a little funny: I tried climbing over the rail on the Brooklyn Bridge’s pedestrian walk, but I was so skinny from malnutrition and years of substance abuse that a strong wind knocked me on my butt. I saw this as the ultimate insult, not even being able to kill myself, which gives you an idea of my state of mind at the time.

I walked away from that incident my to chase another bag of heroin. Trapped inside my warped thinking, I had this fear that I would botch up my own suicide and merely succeed in paralyzing myself, damning myself to chase drugs from the disadvantage of a wheelchair. I decided I would make someone else put myself out of my misery.

And though I speak lightly today of that time, I was very miserable. I don’t believe in a God in the traditional Christian/ Judeo sense, but back then I would pray each night that some Higher Power would find it in their mercy to kill me in my sleep. Yet, every day I awoke to my misery. I would always wake up broke, but still manage to spend $300 by the end of the day, feeding a merciless heroin habit.

How does one spend $300 a day, you ask? I took to ripping off drug-dealers, never a safe proposition. One day a drug dealer, a victim of one of my swindles, threatened me with a gun. I grabbed the gun by the barrel, put it to my forehead, and begged him to shoot. All I asked was that he made sure to kill me because, “You would be doing me a favor.”

This was in broad daylight in the middle of a crowded New York City street. I remember a crowd forming and people screaming; but what I remember most was thinking that this was my way out. “Do it,” I yelled. He pulled the trigger and…

Nothing happened.

I don’t know if the gun jammed or if it wasn’t loaded, but for whatever reason, the gun failed to discharge. My would-be assistant “suicider” freaked out, yanked the gun from my hands, and walked away, calling me crazy. I called at him, let him know he could get another chance. That’s how much I wanted to die...

I thought I could do nothing right.

That wasn’t the worst of it, my life continued to bottom out until November 26th, 1990 when I experienced an incident so traumatic it would change me and my world in an inexplicable way. Actually, most people would consider the events that transpired on that drizzly, dreary November day as a defeat.

Very simply, after being released from prison for only fourteen days, I was re-arrested. It was also that last day of my active addiction -- the last day I took a drug.

I didn’t know it then but it was the beginning of a new life: a life that today is far from perfect, that has suffering, illness, death, and many challenges, but also a sense of joy at its core. This is part of the reason I do the work that I do. I know even the worst of us have the potential to liberate ourselves from our own self-made prisons. And let me be clear: we’re all “doing time” in some way, we all wear shackles. We all have patterns of behavior or baggage.

No, I am not a religious person. My personal view is that religion is for people who are afraid of hell and spirituality is for those who have already been there. I simply try to be the best person I can be on a daily basis and oftentimes I fall short of the mark. However, my intent are usually good and my direction orderly -- I try to live a life centered on spiritual or personal growth.

On that day, nineteen years ago, I had no way of knowing of the joy I would experience today. It’s a joy independent of any person, place, or thing. I can be sad, happy, angry, disappointed, disgusted -- I can be experiencing any number of attachments -- but at the center, at the very core of me, there is an invincible joy greater than any drug-induced high I have ever experienced. And believe me, coming from me, that’s saying a lot.

On that day, sitting there in the midst of failure and utter humiliation, I came undone. And that was a good thing, because in being obliterated I became open and willing. In emptying myself, I came to see that what I perceived as emptiness was in reality my innate potential as a human being.

I am genuinely grateful. This past year, as with all years, has been a challenging. I have experienced sadness, frustration, happiness, rejection -- the full catastrophe! I could easily

surmise, if I were so disposed, that my life, that life itself, sucks. But that’s a coward’s lie. Life is a gift -- probably the most precious of gifts. And at the very least there is nothing worse than that day nineteen years ago. Today I woke up and I am me... and for that I am most grateful.

May you all have as much to be thankful for…

Love,

Eddie