Thanksgiving....it's long, but maybe worth reading. To all who ever worked, lived, visited PPL; good memories

I spent years living and working with convicts, criminals, and addicts with the intent of helping to lead people out of misery and pain. Not alone, but with others who found their way out. With all my heart, I believe that people lucky enough to overcome their misery and pain experience far greater extremes of bliss and joy than people who have no misery and pain

I have known -

• A woman who wrote in her autobiography in treatment “my nightmare as a child began the day I was born. My mother was addicted to heroin”.
• A daughter who begged her mother to come out of a “nod” to just talk to her
• A mother “nodded” out for 25 years, never considering the option of stopping – her grown son didn’t even know her without heroin.
• A man who has served 25 years for a murder in a drug deal gone bad; he has more character and goodness than most people I know.
• A 58 year old woman, who remembers a rage deep enough at age 17 to kill her stepfather; she stopped because of the tears welling in her baby brother’s eyes.
• A young man serving life for putting a gun to his crack dealer’s head; the crack dealer who pressed charges; the grandfatherly crack dealer who owns an apartment complex and sells crack to women and children.
• A woman robbed, attacked, raped by three ski-masked men; 25 years later, she cannot be in a house alone at night; the nights forever changed.
• A child with no childhood, born addicted to heroin – yet still innocent, naïve, later, so full of pain, taken out by five bullets in his chest.
• A bright young woman who mutilates herself with sharp objects; to erase another pain far worse.
• A man whose only dream was to have a television in his cell
• A woman out of prison 21 years, haunted still by the memories of the times she ‘sold out’ morally to ‘survive’.
• Men and women that lust desperately to ingest something into their noses, mouths, veins, eventually their souls– to escape the pain of their existence.

I have known men and women, who lived on the bottom, grew up on the bottom –and then rose above the bottom, never to return. My life work is about never going back to the bottom.

Thanksgiving – what a great holiday; it allows us a pause – to just be thankful!

Each of you has a story that brought you to this moment–stories of pain, trauma, betrayal, and destruction. If you are able to overcome your story, integrate and cherish it, you will find unbridled peace of mind, gratitude, and humility.

How can we give thanks without appreciating the bittersweet fact that somewhere, someone is worse off. Somewhere:

• A man is dying of AIDS – alone
• A grandmother spends thanksgiving alone; her children lives are too busy this year
• A child cowers in a corner, afraid of the beating to come
• A mother cowers in a shelter; her eyes blackened after the beating
• Unkind strangers avoid the hollow empty eyes of the homeless man who asks for a quarter
• A women is doing life without parole
• A child is convicted as an adult
• A man is doing life without parole

I am thankful for all I have learned, have yet to learn and for being able to share it with so many people

Most of all, I am thankful for the privilege of dreaming for people who cannot yet dream for themselves.

With all my heart – Happy Thanksgiving

"Wise People walk the road that leads upward towards life,
Not the road that leads downward towards death".

Proverbs 15:24