Turbulent Times

New Horizons, the non-profit organization I head is definitely moving forward, now, toward fulfilling the dreams for which we came into being; first as a counseling center in 1980. Then as a therapeutic community in 1985, more specifically, in 1995, as a non-profit organization intent on teaching and implementing the treatment model we had developed. By that point, our successes with guiding both personal and communal transformation had established a worthy reputation for us, allowing us to open our doors, at that time, as a training center and healing sanctuary up here in the mountains, just above Harpers Ferry.

Summer Solstice week-end, 2013, we are intent on, officially, opening these doors, once more, to do that which we came to do on this beautiful land of our’s. It has probably been fifteen long years since we had such a celebration.

The dream house hasn’t yet materialized here. Will it or won’t it? Who knows? Rather I have learned to let go of dreams. Yet not let go of them at all. Maybe the shift is that we are doing better at letting go of the notion that I, Anastasia, have some kind of inordinate capacity to control the master plan of anything and can, thus, assist others in doing the same. I, certainly, have come, personally, to accept this as reality, expanding in the process my sensibilities on how to sidestep others imposing that grandiose role upon me.

There have been wonderful times, here, for New Horizons in the past. And, there have been those that were inordinately trying. The latter, primarily, arising out of my term of blindness and recovery from the ordeal (1998 – 2006).

But it wasn’t until recently, however, that it became apparent that whatever the ups and downs facing us, the reengagement we were seeking with mainstream life, when I/we began to take our place in what had become of our country after “911,” was that there was so much for us to do, far and beyond the boundaries of our signature programs; all interconnected with therapeutic community projects.

Today there is no book publication launching planned, as was in the offing when I lost my eyesight in 1998. The furniture is worn and shabby; the landscaping very much in need of tending. And, me the Executive Director, while ever grateful and joyful beyond words to have been granted my eyesight, once again,  am sometimes weary of how steep and how hard has been the ascent out my darkness and into the light.

Destiny seems to call us now; New Horizons and myself, to move beyond the limits of therapeutic community work into an engagement with our greater society. “thinking globally, acting locally.” This is no time to pull back now.

No longer is New Horizons to limit itself to the treating of relationship and personality addictions, especially as it becomes increasingly clear that the peoples of most of our planet earth are driven by excessive survival imperatives; the essence of the non-ingested chemical addictions we had been treating formerly, anyway.

Today the name of our game is “Lean in to the light and learn the art of transcending separation; from self, from others, from all that is embodied in the Great Creation.

These are turbulent times.  And who is to know whether or not a warrior woman, such as I, is genuinely too world weary to continue the climb upward to the high steppes of human existence, or simply just complaining, like far too many others are wont to do these days, rather than seeing this precious time as a challenging but magnificent opportunity; evolutionary motion now in high gear, in these –

Turbulent times.