Drab autumn days. Leaves the color of old copper coins. Days meant for sofas and blankets and gloomy tunes. In short, my favorite kind of days. Days of tea and cloudy afternoons and poetry. Days of naps and not brushing your teeth. Days of incense, grandfather clocks and video games, wasting your time. Days where time has no hold over you. Days spent fixed on the highest branches of some solitary, motionless tree.

When I quit drinking the only way I could replicate that feeling was by taking a hot bath. It was like peeling my body off, sliding from one form into another. Now I take one every afternoon, so hot I’m salmon colored and wincing. (Maybe it’s less of a feeling and more of an un-feeling.)

In the bath the gray outside my window, the trees skeletal, a few remaining birds. The look of the leaves tidied in their beds, swept to the sides. The yard in a state of rest. I will hook the towel around my waste and lay myself down by the fake Christmas tree to dry. It’s the closest I come to yoga nowadays, corpse pose.

The habit hangs onto you, the daily routines. “Habit” comes from the Latin habitus, to have or to hold. We inhabit places; habits inhabit us.

But the word also refers to one’s appearance or condition, as in a nun’s habits, and maybe there’s no accident to that. What we have/do, how we look: the external appearance and internal disposition are one and the same. What to wear, then, in place of these old habits once they’re let go?

I made a Persian saffron rice dish that came out like a cake with a golden crust, dried cranberries, caramelized onions and fresh rosemary inside. That and a pumpkin red lentil soup topped with sautéed onion and toasted pepitas, cumin seed.

We watched a horror film and it started with George Harrison’s “Beware of Darkness,” from his 1970 release All Things Must Pass that came out just before I was born, 55 years ago this month.

Because we had the closed caption on I noticed the lyrics for the first time and the phrase “beware of Maya” he uses toward the end. I had to look that one up: a Buddhist warning about becoming too enamored of material things and failing to see the spiritual depth in the world. Maya as an illusion, a form of magic that misleads us from our true purpose, a deeper understanding of reality. Attachment and suffering, that same combination.

I sat in the dark thinking about that with my pumpkin soup and the dog in her diaper as George beamed in from a distant spiritual plane digitized and imploring hear me lord, please hear me lord.

It’s hard to over the sound of the shower George, I thought to myself and laughed, toasting him with a nod and a phantom drink. But I turned the volume up and he just kept repeating the same words.

Categories: Addiction, Creative Nonfiction, Poetry

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, journal writing, prose, spirituality