revel in this

Mother's Day, 2013.

Thankfulness seeps into my soul, like the slow drip of a hidden spring.

It's thirst that led me to it's Source.  Isn't it always?  I've found a river beneath all the weight of life's topsoil--clean, clear, life-giving water that's fed by tears and purified a thousand times over.  Gratefulness bubbles up from the hard ground, and proves that it's stronger.

Always stronger.

My husband told me a story about the sea, how he walked along the beach in Haiti.  Picking his way through trash and debris on the shores that should be beautiful.  And that's when he saw them.  Thousands of green and blue and aquamarine pieces of glass, smoothed into stones by a pounding surf.  Sea glass.  He brought bags of them home and we couldn't tell they were once cast away bottles, smoothing our hands over their surface, enamored by their muted colors of jade and sky and sea.

Gratefulness.

Like rushing water, it smooths sharp corners and rough patches, wearing a path through walls of stubborn rock.  It's gratefulness that polishes the dullness right out of life.  Because there's the ordinary day in and day out that a dreamer like me never really learned how to navigate.  The everyday ebb and flow of an ancient tide.  But there's treasure, always treasure to be unearthed by another wave.  

So, I lay back on another mother's quilt made decades ago, head in the clouds, hands in the sand, my baby flinging her arms at the sky beside me.  I hear the voices of my children and their daddy catching crabs amid the sound of a gently lapping surf.  And I want to bottle this immense gratefulness and bring it home to the ordinary.  To spill it out on all those days I need it most.  Making shiny and new all these treasures I hold.

P.S.  Thank you, Joel, and Thaddeus, Boston, Astair, Legend, and Story.  Thank you for filling my days with adventure and my heart with overwhelming gratitude.  Thank you for making me a mother, and thank you, Lord, for teaching me everyday how to be one.