Reading Alan Watts in Emily Dickinson’s Front Yard

by Leonard Buschel

As I approach turning 32 years clean and sober in Alcoholics Anonymous, I am reminded of a very special afternoon many years ago when I was Reading Alan Watts in Emily Dickinson’s Front Yard.

I was probably high even though I was at a Macrobiotic retreat in Amherst, and my sensei Michio Kushi was adamantly not in favor of smoking pot or hashish. Yet, what a great feeling that magical plant gave me every time I inhaled it into my lungs. Every time! One time in a hotel room in Israel, with my friend Joe Brodsky, we didn’t have a pipe, but we did have a lighter, so we just lit a 200 gram brick of Red Lebanese on fire, and breathed in the smoldering embers after we blew out the flame. We could not not get high, no matter what. Eventually that brick plus two more, ended up in my girdle wrapped in holy land Saran Wrap, under the slacks I was wearing when we flew into Kennedy Airport a week later.

Remembering back to that special summer day in Massachusetts I had a VERY different feeling, a feeling like I had never had before, not even on acid. The words of the philosopher, who I met in the late ’60s when he spoke at a synagogue in Elkin’s Park outside Philly, and the words of the America’s finest female poet, exploded/blended/merged in my mind and heart simultaneously.

Time stood still and raced in all directions. North, South, East and West, and there I was in the middle of the universe. Not the ones astronomers look at with their telescopes, or Christians look for on crosses, or Jews look for on Wailing Walls, the Universe that exists in every blade of grass, on the head of every pin, and occasionally at my home group at the Whitefire Theater in Sherman Oaks. There, I am allowed to, sit among them, through the kindness of one time strangers, three mornings a week, even though I don’t identify as a real alcoholic. I did drugs every day for 26 years, and alcohol is a liquid drug.

I’m not sure what the bigger miracle it is, that I never got busted dealing substantial quantities of drugs for 23 years, or after two days at the Betty Ford Center, experiencing a divine intervention and in less than an instant, as all desire for drugs left me.

So I wasn’t sure about the Vodka, Gin or Tequila, since I had never gotten drunk accidentally, drank alone, no DUI’s and never any puking. Never saw anyone in my family ever get drunk or stoned or vote for a Republican. But like I said, alcohol is a liquid drug, and I LOVED drugs. However, since I never saw the Lord’s Prayer on the wall of any pot warehouse in Miami, just a guy in the corner with an AK-47 in his lap. AA meetings felt like a very special holy place to me. And they still do!