I woke up today with a wonderful feeling of gratitude. In the immidiate, I was grateful to be safe at home with my family after driving through the night in some of the most intense rainfall I’ve ever driven through (which is saying something for anyone who’s lived in the South). I was gratefull that it only flirted with turning into snow on one of the three mountain passes.

I felt immense gratitude for the sun and wind outside. I realized, perhaps for the first time ever, that I was born in an incredibly moody, wonderful time of the year. Two weeks ago we got pummeled by snow and today, as I look up our hillside while I write this, the golden mountain wild grass and like-colored sedimentary rock are once again completely uncovered; the ponderosas have no white weight inhibiting them from waving in the wind, and the last remnance of leaves from our one deciduous tree are shedding beautifully in the sunlight.

It actually may have been looking outside – or perhaps the outside looking in as the sun peaked through the slit in the shades – that surged the initial flood of graditudinal seritonin through my body, as it reminded me that we own this space; that the sun saturating the trees and grass and rocks – those are our trees,grass, and rocks that it nurishes. We own this property where we came safely home to at 2:30 this morning. In this moment, it’s not lost on me how fortunate I am to say that word: own. I can’t say that I deserve to own a home, let alone a chunk of land surrounding it. Sure, I can come up with a cocktail of metrics that defend my rightfulness in posessing this property – but I’m just as capable of being on the prosecution side, arguing why I, of all people, shouldn’t.

But today, as I woke, I didn’t have that meta-analyisis running through my head. What I had was extreme gratitude for the fact that, by forces well outside of my control, we ended up here, now. And gratitude emerged.

Further, I was surprised to feel that 37 feels much better than 36 did. That might also be in part the moodiness of an odd number versus an even – I’ll at least claim the possibility. But as I reflected, I think I came to a more comprehensive reasoning. Years 34-36 for me were very hard. Almost everything that I had done up to that point to build my personhood was washed away by a life-changing decision to leave a business that I had built from scratch, move across the country to where we knew no one, and become a full-time, “stay at home” (quotations added for every so-labeled parent, who understands that staying at home is a gross misnomer that absolutely negates all of the grocery getting, park/library/school/doctor/sports running, side business hustling, etc. that happens) dad to three very young humans.

To look back, it was absolutly what I needed in order to soften my set ways of being in the world. The 20’s and 30’s can be such a wonderful place of growth, or, sadly, they can reinforce rigid ideoloiges that keep us stuck in an ignorance of how we need to heal. I was teetering on the edge, and this severing was exctly what I needed.

My epiphany this morning revealed that in years 34 and 35, I had to deal with me. Interestingly, I had spent most of year 33 stone-cold sober, and I thought that I had dug down and “found myself”. What I’ve come to realize is that, though it was a great practice for me, it actually started clarifying internally that “sobriety”, to use the popular definition, was just another way that I might define myself – another way that I might defend against the percieved chaos of the unknown. But what I found by stripping away (unitentionally) most of the ways that I had come to define myself, e.g. entrepreneur, bread-winner, “head” of household (among others), I was able to start uncovering the reasons for my severe unease of being in the world.

It’s an ongoing struggle, but year 36 revealed that I was (though I wouldn’t have consented to the sentiment) ready to face many of the outside elements of hardship. I had apperently had my time of manicuring my lawn in reletive peace every week for 10+ months a year in Alabama while I listened to voices that tore down my categories of what I believed, challenging my life-long narratives and tormenting me into growth – now it was time to go outward, to inhabit the world of people and places that constructed such narratives. To say the least, I was rocked. It was and is a struggle, but still, as the sun has long since retired on this anniversary of my birth, I feel immense gratitude that these struggles have taken place; that I haven’t either buckled down into dogmatism nor resigned into passivism. I am awake, I am aware, and I am healing.