I started an Open Group For Bedlam Farm on Facebook last month – we have closed off new membership for now –  and now there are 800 creative people on it, sharing words, photos, ideas, poems, love stories, blogs, animals, nature, art and writing. We call the group a Ministry of Encouragement, and I have never seen so many gifted people open up and lift up everyone else in such a positive and infectious way. This is the promise of the Internet, delayed by the angry and the greedy for so long. One of the Open Groupers is a young man named Andrew Sigler, one year sober, taking what he calls another stab at life.

Andrew didn’t know it when he wrote about this, but this is precisely what I told a psychiatrist a few years back when I was in the midst of my long overdue and inevitable crack-up: “I want another stab at life.” I wanted to live outside of panic and fear. I wanted  to take a stab at responsibility, at being honest, at facing myself. This, is turned out, the was the point of my hero journey, the crucible. A few challenging years later, I have love, am not in panic and am learning who I am, learning to be honest, to be responsible for my life, to be authentic. Hard lessons, battles, the combat of the awakened. This struggle is, I think, the pathway to the meaningful life. If there is a way around it, I couldn’t find it, and I tried. You can be addicted to alcohol, or you can be addicted to drama, delusion, impulse and addiction, the life of the struggle story people. There are so many ways to lose your life, so few ways to get it back.

Andrew isn’t sure he is going to make it yet, but I am sure he is going to make it. I know what he doesn’t know, he’s done the hard part, he’s faced up to himself. We are a community, the awakened, the take-another-stab-at-lifers. The rest is just life in all of it’s pain and glory. The perfect life is not without suffering, the perfect life is about how you suffer, and how you find joy and meaning and stand in your truth every single day.