years ago, a thanksgiving came and went just like this one, and late at night – like now – with hot tea and under a dim drafting table light so as not to wake the husband and sleeping baby, i sat and wrote a thank you letter to share with all of the people i love. it was called this day, and as i recall, came to be written at the end of a day much like today: an ordinary saturday, one graced by a soft, almost-winter sky, filled with chores and tasks and a few simple meals, a few bursts of laughter, and an evening gathering of old friends and new that warmed like brandy and left me a bit awed for their kindness and authenticity.

my landscape is much changed from the one i occupied all those years ago {fourteen, to be exact} but i still feel very much as i did then. then my daughter maya was a little person in a very little world, one in which naps and diapers and pingu the penguinese-speaking penguin ruled our world. life was simple – although maybe that is just retrospect talking – and need based and lonely and impossibly sweet and challenging in its moment-to-moment tininess. motherhood did not come easy to me; i was 38 when maya was born and i had been traveling and living abroad and chasing images at the end of my paintbrush for a very long time. in the set of years before maya arrived – when it was just ricky and me – i was unlearning a traditional art school education, working my ass off, learning to be a designer, taking yoga every other day and rescuing dogs on every street corner i passed it seemed.

and then came maya. collectively we had no idea what we were doing, and singularly i was not prepared for how much of my life would come to a screeching halt as i shifted my focus to this impossibly small person with impossibly big needs. i was overwhelmed, in love, and terrified i would not know the steps to take on this incredibly scary new path. we sold our house and moved back in to the elegant old apartment by the ocean we had lived in. we paid off our debt and downsized. i could throw maya in her stroller and walk anywhere, including the market. i met moms, new ones, who were brilliant and gorgeous and brought creativity and community to my life and my daughter’s. i learned to let go of the me i had always been, and starting thinking and feeling differently about the world, as an us. once you make that shift, turn the corner in to parenthood, it seems impossible to ever go back.

a dozen years have passed since that suspended set of months and years was all i could see stretched around and beyond me. toddlerhood seemed never ending and as i look back i recall hundreds of moments i would give my eyeteeth to return to and experience once again. i see things i would do differently. things i would do the same. people i would wrap my arms around more frequently because they made such an enormous impact on my life and the life of my girl. you all know who you are, and though our paths don’t intersect as they once did when our little ones moved through the days along side of us, you all hold that particular piece of me that can only be described as my most grateful heart.

last week at maya’s high school thanksgiving celebration, family and students and staff gathered in a remarkable place maya gets to go to every day to learn and evolve and find out about who she really is. there were student exhibits and projects to view, and one in particular both struck and stayed with me. in maya’s philosophy class the students recently read and analyzed plato’s allegory of the cave. during the festivities we had a chance to visit a cave students had constructed. our wrists were bound – representing the chains plato’s cave dwellers were restricted by – and a series of blurry shadow images were projected on to the wall in front of us, fodder for what would be a student-led conversation on reality and assumptions after our time in the cave.

one of the questions eventually posed was where a loss or discrepancy may exist between the shadows {our naive construct of the world around us} and our ultimate understanding of the image behind the shadow {that which really exists}. i searched my mind for an experience or situation i could identify in my own life, where object and shadow contradicted the other’s existence, but couldn’t find a single place where a wash of reality had obliterated the nuance of shadow. this is not naivete – i have lost and fought and been knocked down and sideways plenty in my life. but reality – as harsh and glaring and unpalatable as it may be sometimes – has never been able to permanently eclipse the shadows i see. for me, life seems to have always been imbued with an understanding of shadow not as dark, or remote, or unreal. rather, shadow represents possibility, the necessary negative to a positive {or vice versa}, beauty, perception.

i sat on on my beautiful friend anne’s kitchen counter top last night with two women i never see enough of, and watched handfuls of her european friends pour in to the house for her annual post-thanksgiving potluck, food in hand and cheek-kissing everyone, including me. anne was moving between french and spanish and english and dragging me to the dance floor to shake my stuff amongst a dozen people i don’t yet know. the music was just right, candles were lit and shadows were being thrown around the room as everyone danced and played. anne looked at me and exclaimed in her soft accent, “everyone is so beautiful!” and she was right, they truly were. i have to imagine, it was the cadence of the music, the reflection of their swaying bodies and joyful faces, the shadows doing their work.

which brings me back to now, and here, and gratitude. for every sunset being witnessed at the moment the world quiets, there is a sunrise being seen by a world that is just waking. coffee cups lay stacked in the sink waiting for a wash here, while a squeaky clean cup is being pulled from a shelf there, and filled with coffee or tea in a thousand different languages. for love lost, there is a place of opening where love is discovered, and fostered. and for every object that occupies a space in the world, there too is its reflection, in shadow, claiming its own territory, its right to exist. a gift to us that says, see me, as you will, as you need to, as you are.