Seth Haines's Blog, page 21
October 3, 2017
Where Wonder Lives
I bird-dog my way down to northern Louisiana, following a lead on a story near my grandfather’s old stomping grounds. Four miles from Black Bayou, I roll the windows down, and I smell the humidity, the cypress sap, the sweet mud. There is Bartholomew Lake, just to the east. In the bones of an ancient cypress, anhinga perch. Spanish moss beards the limbs of the living trees. A truck runs too close to the shoulder of the highway, and I hear the duh-dum duh-dum of the “waker-uppers.” I am seven...
September 27, 2017
Confessions of a Drug Dealer (A Recovery Room Post)
It’s National Recovery Month, and in celebration, I’ve invited Laura Beth Martin, my favorite drug dealer (a pharmacist to be exact), to bring an offering to the table. I met Laura at a writer’s conference a couple of years ago, found out she was an Arkansas girl who had a penchant for pie and drawling i-s. Enjoy her piece, then head over to her site for more of her writing.
Welcome Laura Beth Martin to the Recovery Room.
***
Her voice falters and slips as I ask her how she’s doing. I notice...
September 21, 2017
Four Years Sober
It’s the fourth anniversary. What a sentence to write.
The first year of sobriety snuck up on me. It was September 21, 2014, a day that grabbed me from behind, reached up and wrapped its hands around my throat. It’d been the hardest year of my life, and the thought of running dry for another sixty-or-whatever years threatened to choke the life out of me.
As it went, though, I kept on living, and in that living, I added a few days to that year. Then a few months. The second year passed with le...
September 20, 2017
Are you Israel or Pharaoh?
In 2016, I met Steve Wiens, a pastor in Minneapolis. I knew I liked Steve from the beginning. I didn’t know that Steve would become one of the rarest gems of the human experience—a friend.
In his new book Whole: Restoring What’s Broken in Me, You, and the Entire World, Steve invites us to stop reading the scriptures. Instead, Steve invites us to experience the scriptures. Experiencing the scripture changes our paradigm, it allows us to imagine the many ways God dances in our modern context. I...
September 14, 2017
Small Men Cheating (On Wives At The Bar)
It’s National #RecoveryMonth, and today I’m writing a somewhat unorthodox post. Sobriety isn’t about the doing or not-doing. It’s about the character of the heart.
***
I sat at the restaurant bar because that’s where people eat alone. I was on the road, working on a project in Colorado Springs and after a hard day of work, I was trying my best to enjoy a greasy slab of beef sandwiched between a brioche roll. Across the corner of the bar, two fellas slumped over near-empty trays of chili tater...
September 12, 2017
Addiction, Dependency, and The Sacred Enneagram
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. We’re all drunk on something. Perhaps this statement is too simplistic, you think. Perhaps you’d claim no dependencies, no addictions, no compulsive habits. But ask yourself this: What is addiction?
In his new book, The Sacred Enneagram: Finding Your Unique Path to Spiritual Growth, Chris Heuertz offers unique insights about addiction. And he’s not writing of the common addictions—booze, pills, porn gambling, whatever. Instead, Chris digs deeper,...
September 7, 2017
Son of a Fix.
By now, you know it’s National Recovery Month, the month dedicated to increasing awareness and understanding of mental and substance use disorders and celebrate the people who find recovery. (People like all of us.) In sober celebration, I’ve taken a hard look at my own recovery (alcohol was my lover). I’ve reviewed my old journals and asked whether I’m keeping my own inner sobriety fresh. Recovery, see, is a sourdough starter; you have to keep feeding it or it’ll die a stinky death.
Yesterda...
September 5, 2017
It’s National Recovery Month. Come Clean?
September is National Recovery Month, a month raising awareness for those struggling with addiction, dependency, and compulsive habits. What’s more, September is the month I came clean four years ago. It’s the month I stepped into my own exploration of sobriety. That exploration has led me here, and I couldn’t be more grateful.
Around these parts, we don’t limit discussion of recovery to alcohol or drugs. Instead, we look at recovery as something for everyone, something for the chemical addic...
August 30, 2017
Celebrating Your Competition
Vocational success is not a zero-sum gain. Another’s accolades, accomplishments, and approval do not take away from yours. As I wrote yesterday, there’s enough work, enough success to go around. And if that’s the case, shouldn’t we celebrate each other?
The zero-sum game vocational mentality is present in every occupational field, and the writing world is no exception. I’d like to write well-regarded novels, great magazine articles, and sought after works of non-fiction. So often, though, the...
August 29, 2017
Vocational Freedom (Release the Zero-Sum Game)
For twelve years, I worked as a litigator at the largest firm in the state of Arkansas. Litigation so often felt like a zero-sum game, a winner-take-all proposition. My win was my opponent’s loss, and the winners were rewarded. The good litigators never lost, they said, and the awful litigators never last. This is the way the law works. She’s not a jealous mistress; she’s a black widow.
The zero-sum game is an unspoken facet of the lawyer’s ethos. If the cases came to my door, they didn’t com...