Gratitude Sunday: Time

“Courage doesn't always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, "I will try again tomorrow."  -- Mary Anne Radmacher 

I know it's Wednesday but I've been thinking about this since Sunday.  Does that count?

This time last year I was in a dark wood of loss and confusion.  I was in a place that did not feel like home, alone and wondering which way to go.  There were no clues telling me that I was at the edge of the wood, but I was.  Time was working its magic and, though I couldn't see it, things were about to change. 

Within a few days I would attend a photography workshop where I would learn a new way of seeing and make a new friend who would inspire me to start a blog.  Writing my confusion into the blog and meeting a group of incredibly generous and wise women bloggers helped me have the courage to keep putting one step in front of the other and doing what called to me.  Within a month an unlikely relationship resolved itself and released me from the pain and confusion that accompanied it.  New friends and new opportunities began to show up.  Life began to call me back into the light.

So this week's gratitude is for the gift of time that allows our wounds to heal, our spirits to mend, and our vision to rise to new vistas. Time is the currency of life and I particularly like what Agatha Christie said:

I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing. 

I have a friend who is currently in that "acutely miserable" place caring for her husband as he spends the last currency of his life.  It's a hard place and she cannot see the light that time will eventually offer her.   It's almost impossible to remember that there will be light again when we're in that dark wood but if we could carry that hope like a smooth rock in our pocket that we could rub as we walk through the pain and confusion, perhaps it would help.

For any of you who are in that dark wood, may these words be like that smooth rock and offer you hope that the edge is near, the light will come.