Have you ever held an acorn in your hand ? As a child I found them fascinating. I loved their shape and textures. I thought they were kind of cool, and found them excellent for throwing from small hands. Later, I discovered that these were the ideal weapon for a slingshot, a good weight, aerodynamically designed to go a fair distance, and hard, so that they hurt if you managed to get your aim right. But one of the best things about acorn ammunition was it’s plentiful abundance around the bottom of any oak tree, and the ease and speed with which they could be collected. This was highly important to me growing up as a small child in New Zealand. As the youngest of three children, and with two older sisters with mean streaks, this fact fitted very well with my strong desire to even the score for what I perceived to be many many crimes against humanity, namely me.

But as a child frantically stuffing my pockets with acorns/ammunition, with one eye over my shoulder and my ears pricked for the sound of an approaching enemy agent (aka sister) it never occurred to me that I was in fact harvesting Oak seeds, and that each of my bullets had within it all the potential and design specifications for a towering Oak tree.

Each one of those acorns could have turned into dozens of items of furniture, or several wine barrels, or some hot burning firewood, or if it was lucky, a feature of the landscape that would survive for hundreds or perhaps thousands of years. (The oldest living Oak is thought to be around 2000 years old, and is found in Pechanga, in the state of California in the USA.

Despite the fact that my primary intention for these potential giants was that they raise a lasting welt and bruise somewhere on each of my sisters, each one of these perfectly designed ammo units had the potential to be great indeed. But despite that potential, there would still be a range of outside factors that would determine how that Oak tree would turn out, or if it even got the chance to grow at all. Those factors would include the fertility of the soil in which it begins to grow, the availability of water, the weather, the number and proximity of other plants, the possibility of disease, and of course the behaviour and attitude of any people that happened to live nearby.

So while an acorn may represent a blueprint for a possible potential, whether or not that potential is eventually realized is a much more complex matter.

We humans are like that too. At the moment of our conception we are as human acorns. A seed, with all the elements and information to grow an adult human being already in place.  

In the first hours and days of a human life we are nothing more than a fertilized egg, referred to as a Zygote, consisting of just 32 cells and with a length (or should that be height ?)of around half a millimeter. About the size of a Poppy seed. But within those 32 cells is all the information needed to build the finished physical product of an adult human, courtesy of the design instructions in the form of our DNA. From there we quickly mature into an embryo and then a foetus.

 Our DNA contains myriad information relating to our genetic makeup both physical and mental. It has all the plans for our appearance, including our height, eye colour, hair colour and facial features.

It also contains the blueprints for our level of intelligence, our mental and psychological health, and to some degree our temperament. But when it comes to many aspects of our character, in the early stages of our lives, there is also a large quotient of pure undetermined potential.

In other words DNA exerts a significant influence on both physical and mental development, but while DNA provides the blueprint for various traits and characteristics, how our character evolves depends greatly on the environment in which we grow. It’s the combination of these influences that shape the full spectrum of human development.

I was born in Invercargill New Zealand, the countries southern most city at the bottom of New Zealand’s South Island – Te Waipounamu. At latitude 45 south, Invercargill is one of the Southern most cities in the world. My family moved away from Invercargill when I was just 7 years old so my early memories of the city are relatively few.

 I do however clearly recall travelling south from the city towards the southern most tip of the country, a rather  cold and inhospitable area known as Slope Point.

Having grown up in Invercargill, I was well used to the cold weather and early sunsets in the winter months. In June the sun is gone by around 5pm. As we drove through the countryside surrounded by wide expanses of pastures populated by a seemingly infinite number of sheep (at that time New Zealand’s sheep population was approximately 60 million, compared to a human population of just 3 million) as was my habit, I drank in every detail of the surrounding countryside, the colour of the grass, the crops, every car that passed, the road signs,every house we encountered, every horse, unfamiliar bird, in fact pretty much everything my eyes could see, and asked questions about it all. And as we got closer to Slope Point, especially the trees.

As I looked out of the side window of the family Volkswagen beetle, I was intrigued to see the trees along the side of the road appeared to be leaning over in the wind. This would not have been a great surprise except for the fact that I could see that on this particular day the force of the wind was simply not strong enough to push the trees so far over, it all looked a little surreal and in some way unnatural to me. So I asked my father about this.

 He explained that the winds in this part of the country almost never stopped, and that this area was highly exposed to the ‘roaring 40’s’. This is the belt of wind at latitude 40 that sailors named centuries ago, and that whips around the Southern Ocean. Unlike the northern hemisphere, which has a large amount of land at this latitude, the Southern Hemisphere is mostly ocean at latitude 40, with just some tips of land such as Tasmania in Australia, New Zealand’s South Island and the very southern tip of South America protruding into that zone. With a lack of land to slow things down the wind literally roars across the sea and subsequently this part of New Zealand almost constantly.

I pondered this fact for quite a while. Here were these trees, having been deliberately planted to protect the surrounding pastures and animals from the constant blustering wind, and which  by rights should be growing towards the sun like any normal tree, but instead, due to the incessant influence of an unseen force in their environment, were growing on a weird angle. To my young mind the trees looked stunted in their growth, and somehow misshapen as a result of the duress they had endured throughout their entire lives. I empathized with these poor trees, who had obviously never had the chance to grow straight, but despite their unfortunate  shape, and that stressed appearance, I realised that in some way they must be very strong.

Those strange trees left an impression on me, and over the next few years I would recall their shape and the feelings they generated within me. I even gave a talk in front of my primary school class about my trip to Slope Point, and the hard life that those trees had had to endure. I felt an affinity with them although at that time I had no knowledge of why.

It’s funny how sometimes the most seemingly irrelevant things stay in our minds, stored away in some small corner of our memories, only to re-emerge and poke us awake even though we weren’t really asleep. At least not in the conventional sense.

A Slope Point Human

It was 22 years later while walking along a deserted beach in torrential rain and howling winds that the trees of slope point suddenly popped into my mind, and in one of those moments of clarity that are gifted to the newly sober after a long period of active addiction, I suddenly realized why the bent trees of Slope Point had stuck in my mind and what had motivated my thoughts about them as a child.

I came to see that in so many ways I was just like them, a Slope Point human who had grown out of shape from my original design, and who in some respects had become twisted and stunted in my growth because of forces in my life I had no real awareness of, nor eyes to see.

In that moment of insight, (of which I was to have many more in the years to come) I was struck with the notion that the original potential that had existed within me as an acorn/zygote, had to this point been wasted as I had deviated from it’s original blueprints to fall into a self destructive habit of addiction.

Questions began to flood into my mind, who might I have been ? what might I have achieved ? if only I had lived a life without the dramas and self destructive tendencies of my alcoholism. Quickly I silenced this inner dialogue, I had already learned through my experiences in residential rehabilitation that regret is like resentment, it is a poison that will eat us up from the inside.

I then remembered one important detail of my impressions of those Slope Point trees as a child, I recalled that despite their misshapen appearance, I knew that they must possess a great deal of strength, to be able to endure the adversities of their lives and still survive. I decided then that I would focus on this impression rather than allow my self to drink the mental poison of regret.

There can be no doubt that falling into an addiction like alcoholism, has no place in the blueprints of our unformed souls. And despite how the experts may push the idea that some of us have a predisposition towards addiction, it is equally obvious to me that the conditions have to be favourable for that predisposition to be activated. In a truly nurturing environment, that influence will be utterly meaningless.

For all of us who found our way down the the rabbit hole of addiction, there has been a series of circumstances, an over shadowing influence or a particular and unique trauma that has lived within us, until the rabbit hole appeared. And when it showed up, we went in. In most cases no-one forced us, and even if we were helped along the way by enablers that aided us in our own demise, remember that they too are part of a network of suffering, and as such, are as worthy of compassion as ourselves.

There is no leverage to be found in blame. Blame falls into the resentment category, and should be avoided at all costs. If we allow it into our lives, it will be the poison that keeps us sick. If there are others who hold some level of culpability for our wounds, the only way to heal is to do what is necessary for our own well-being, which in most cases means simply to forgive and detach.

Rememeber that we are all on a journey through time called a life, that none of us are perfect, and know that we all pay for our mistakes, even if you cannot see it happening, it is the law of the cosmos and applies to everyone under the sky.

To be open to the knowledge that we have within us the conditions for addiction is to be empowered to live differently, for unless we are able to acknowledge our own darkness, then we will never be able to open ourselves to the light. This is power, a manifestation of strength just like those bent trees at Slope Point.

To embrace our own ‘bent-ness’, our twisted psychology and our unique shape, is the beginning of the journey back to wholeness. We may still have work to do to find peace and meaning, but in doing so it is important to acknowledge that we have survived in the face of adversity, and that now we have an opportunity to grow towards the sun.