Thriving...

If you are lucky in this life, you thrive.  In spite of adversity, addiction, and life doing its thing, you rise to the occasion of your life...and you thrive.  In spite of everything...you just fucking thrive.

My friend got here last night with her baby.  The fact that my friend is still alive is a miracle in and of itself...she walked a long road that was precarious and tragic, often.  The fact that she is still on planet earth and now has a baby is nothing short of miraculous.  The fact that I have had a ring side seat, first to the destruction of all that was good, and now all that is amazing and wonderful, is another kind of miracle...

One of the things that I love best about recovery is getting to see lives destroyed and hanging on by a thread, rerouted and altered to the point that they become fully fledged lives that are moving toward the light, not in an ending kind of way, but in a life affirming, joyous kind of way.

Recovery takes absolutely lost souls through the Valley of the Shadow of Death and ushers then through to the other side...and then uses all they survived to help others find their way out.  Brilliant!

Not everyone makes it.  Not everyone gets to thrive.  But some of us do, every day, every single day for the rest of our lives.  And as if that weren’t enough, we also get to participate in the lives of others who get to do the same thing.

My friend has walked a hard road.  Even sober, life has not been easy.  She wanted to be a mom more than anything in this world!  And years of hard living made that possibility perhaps impossible.  But God grants as many miracles as you can stand...and so she was blessed with this beautiful little girl...born 4 months premature, this little bundle of joy, hung in that liminal space between life and death for months.  

But this morning, that little peanut is crawling around on my floor, making dog sounds to the cats and thriving.  Her mom is thriving.  And both of them are extensions of the same miracle played out over days and months and years...one act of surrender years ago led to all of this miraculous stuff happening today.

Thriving is fucking beautiful. And I am so grateful to be a part of their journey  and that their journey of thriving is also part of my journey of thriving...

Again, still...