It’s a little hard to believe, but I’m approaching my one year mark of being home! In fact, at this exact moment last year, I was in Greece with my parents, beginning the end of that life as I knew it. When approaching any kind of anniversary mark, there’s a begging tendency to take a look back and measure the changes that have risen and arrived in the elasped timeframe. I’ve been stringing all these things together for later this month, but my most recent favorite Shauna-chapter kind of beat me to it. So today, I’m saying what she said:

Now we’re talking about celebration. Celebration when you think you’re calling the shots? Easy. Celebration when your plan is working? Anyone can do that. But when you realize that the story of your life could be told a thousand differernt ways, that you could tell it over and over as a tragedy, but you choose to call it an epic, that’s when you start to learn what celebration is. When what you see in front of you is so far outside of what you dreamed, but you have the belief, the boldness, the courage to call it beautiful instead of calling it wrong, that’s celebration.

When you can invest yourself deeply and unremittingly in the life that surrounds you instead of declaring yourself out of the game once and for all, because what’s happened to you is too bad, too deep, too ugly for anyone to expect you to move on from, that’s that good, rich place. That’s the place where the things that looked for all intents and purposes like curses start to stand up and shimmer and dance, and you realize with a gasp that they may have been blessings all along. Or maybe not. Maybe they were curses, in fact, but the force of your belief and your hope and your desperate love for life as it is actually unfolding, has brought a blessing from a curse, like water from a stone, like life from a tomb, like the actualy story of God over and over…

There have been a thousand moments when I have felt the weight and the sadness of this season, approximately. But then there have been some moments where I have felt the blessing and beauty of it, too. Seeing our baby’s face on the ultrasound, eating ice cream with Aaron, having breakfast at Annette’s and taking Spence for a walk, walking on the pier by myself today at lunch at the Phoenix Street Cafe. There is a particular beauty to this season, not the obvious everyhting-is-perfect beauty, but a strange slanted pleasantness that surprises me and catches in my throat like a sob or song.

Nothing good comes easily. You have to lose things you thought you loved, give up things you thought you needed. You have to get over yourself, beyond your past, out from under the weight of your future. The good stuff never comes when things are easy. It comes when things are all heavily weighted down like moving trucks. It comes just when you think it never will, like a shimmering Las Vegas rising up out of the dry desert. sparkling and humming with energy, a blessing that rose up out of a bone-dry, dusty curse.

– Blessings and Curses, from Cold Tangerines by Shauna Niequist