Landing lights in the dark

How one Person in Recovery sees Living Room Cardiff, the new recovery centre for Cardiff and South Wales.


I think in metaphors all the time, it's almost a compulsion, but as I am something of a story teller by trade, I think it's naturally how I am meant to think. I teach history, and from time to time historical visions come to me, and they help me to explain and comprehend my own recovery.
One such image has stayed with me for a while now, and it concerns the fate of American airmen during the Second World War, as they flew in the twilight across the vast expanses of the Pacific Ocean.
They had been sent out to find the Japanese fleet; I can't remember if this was at the Coral Sea or Midway or Leyte, but it was long before the outcome of the war was certain.
They had flown from the decks of America's aircraft carriers, their only home in tens of thousands of square miles of ocean, searching for the Japanese.
When they found them the fighting was bloody and many on both sides were lost, the Americans, having completed their mission, flew home, but as they did, the sun began to set.
The commanders of the US fleet knew that the biggest danger to them was a Japanese reprisal attack coming at night and they decided they could not risk having the landing lights on their aircraft carriers on, as they would stand out like beacons.
So the desperate pilots, now low on fuel circled and circled, looking for ships they could not see, and could not find, until one commander, hearing plane engines that he was sure were American, relented and switched on the flood lights.
Like that, there was and island of light in the dark. Planes that were flying on fumes descended from the night, their exhausted crews tearful with relief.
How like recovery this sounds, we come from so many futile, bloody struggles, so weary and full of pain desperate for anything in the wide lonely oceans and wildernesses of our lives to cling on to, and if we have faith and don't surrender to despair, someone, somewhere will turn on the lights for us.
Once I was the pilot, skidding down the runway, now I am the man on the deck, guiding others to touch down at Living Room Cardiff, on our island of light in the dark.

Nick