(20 December, 2016)

Life is good.

I wake up in between hours of sleep one night, the dark of my room hovering all around me, enveloping me in subconscious whisperings and wanderings. Something inside of me, two opposing parts, suddenly snap into one, casting out breath. Time is still, open, an expanse around me but not within. The next breath I take snags on something deep, a net brushed by a creature hidden beneath the water before the dawn of the world. I feel the musicality of life. There, in the dark, I breath into a part of my body, a part of my mind that hasn’t been touched for a very, very long time. I slip in and out of waking and sleeping, an untamed joy spiraling within me.

Another morning, I sit on my laptop, listening to my favorite music, and the sky overhead is early and grey over the deep lush green of the frangipani tree. I’m hit by gratitude. Life is this beautiful, strange, dark and wonderful thing that stretches before me, a path that I wake up to each morning and rest on each night.

I think of all the wonders of the past year, the people I’ve met, the unexpected places I’ve come across. The tragedies, the failed ideals, the rocks I’ve turned over. The different ways  light has bounded off my being, reflecting from from and onto others.

It’s December 20. My recovery birthday.

It’s been the hardest year of my life, feeling like every day I’m alone on a boat with only fishing nets, trying harder and harder to catch the evasive beauty under the surface. I rarely do. I’m afraid, so afraid of making any mistakes, so afraid of falling out of the comfort of a battered little boat and into the unknown depths.

Yet I know that I would never have made it this far without all of the people in my life, all of the sudden breathless dawns spilling out over the storms. With all of you, I am tethered now to the earth, whether I like it or not. I’m anchored to this life.

So thank you, all of you who have loved me, held me, listened to me. All of you who have the keys of revelation to the mysterious dark rooms of my life. All of you who who have lit the way for a stretch of my journey, the stars I guide myself by, the great tangle of webs and weavers who connect me to the expanse of sky above.

Thank you, thank you, thank you. I’m here because of all of you.