(Very) Thankful Thursday

Today I am grateful for pain. I am grateful for its stretching of me, forcing me into shapes of unwilling growth like topiary from within. I am grateful for the compassion it brings as my fractured self sees all the other fractured selves in the world. I am grateful for the euphoria that comes when pain is so unrelenting. I am grateful for the reminder that I am alive in this perfect moment. I am grateful that pain has cracked me apart and shown me love, real love. I welcome pain’s unrelenting force in my life as it winds me, stops me mid breath, shows me my insignificance and invites me to choose love, forgiveness and most of all, acceptance.

Pain has taken me places I never knew existed. Pain has shown me my own capabilities more clearly than all the other forces of nature operating in my life whether it was pain of birth or pain of the heart. Pain has set me adrift when I sought refuge and captured me when I sought freedom and for these I am grateful. Pain has left permanent scars on my mind, and my heart. The pain of others has sometimes wounded me and sometimes honoured me in the sharing. My pain has scared others, sometimes offered them comfort and the work of it has sometimes even given language to experiences women are not meant to describe aloud.

I have wept enough tears to drown Alice’s mouse, to deny my garden her fertility, to fill oceans. I have many more tears to weep as the pain calls to me, greets me in the morning and releases me unwillingly to restless sleep each night. And I choose acceptance of this pain for to struggle with pain is more painful than lying down and letting it roll over me. I choose acceptance over hope, over optimism, over all the other vain traps that sway me from this path. I choose reality, I choose now, this perfect moment of transcendent pain and I thank the moment for its perfection, its design and its place in this life.