I found this most delightful treasure while beach combing in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. It was a glorious morning and you can’t imagine the joy this brought me. God is said, in the Bible, to know exactly how many hairs are on our head. I don’t doubt it. I mean, He IS all-knowing after all. I had just been through the darkest days of my life, coming closer to  the thought of dying from my brokenness than ever before, and here was this little plastic elephant, making me smile.

I am really just an assemblage of broken pieces thrown together that wound up looking like a thing; echoes of ancestors whose own sins and tribulations still linger through generations, the immense force of suffering catapulting them through space and time to culminate in me.

Who am I, this “me”? I can look at my life from a different place than the spirit who animates my physical body, at war with ego and struggling to make sense of this world, as if the essence of my soul resides in a higher realm and is using my earthly being as a game piece that was carefully chosen. Like Chutes and Ladders. Either climbing to reach higher wisdom by one choice, or being thrust downward into repetitive misery by another. I can’t remember the game’s path that connects the players to a succession of fates by the roll of dice. This game is unlike Chutes and Ladders in that fate is determined by our intentions, understanding that there is no attachment to “up” being positive and “down” being negative. Our spirit-self knows exactly when climbing the ladder or sliding down the chute is of the most benefit. I’ve heard it referred to as the “higher self”, or more poetically, “the better angels of our nature”.  I try not to over-think it. This world is complicated.

The plastic elephant that washed up at my feet at the dawn of a new day was a sign. Just one day earlier I had felt swallowed by an angry sea of emotions, and the lying siren’s call for me to succumb had ushered me into a deep sleep from which I knew not how to awaken.

God knows I love the randomness of finding things that appear where you would never expect to find them, and even more so that it would be a particularly personal object of delight. I knew when I saw it, after my childlike giggle of recognition, that this plastic elephant had also been helplessly drawn into the punishing sea, pounded by waves. And yet there it was with a meandering trail behind it as if it had fought its way back to the shore, lifted and carried to safety, as the morning tide receded.

Hope had returned. If I were meant to die, I would not be here now. Sometimes my emotional pain is so great that it completely shuts me down, physically and mentally. Other times I allow it to wash over me in angry waves, releasing the deluge of salt through tears. It can be difficult to recall the immense joy of feeling happy and carefree. When I am in one of those blissful states where I surrender all my fears, I think to myself, ” This is what makes life worth fighting for.”

So I will never stop remembering how good happiness feels, or counting the many blessings I have that no dark struggle with lingering memories of a tormenting past can ever take away. And I expect miracles, because I am one. I am one in a million, and so is everyone else who continues to stay and fight for a better way to exist with and work towards healing the painful wounds of  a past that we will never change.