It's snowing

It's snowing outside, I've just had a bowl of some kind of incredible stew that my wife left simmering all night, and for the first time in as long as I can remember, feelings of calm, tranquility, peace, and presentness are permeating my being. Looking out the window, I am actually able to focus on the snow and appreciate how amazingly beautiful it is...I feel at home in my own life and able to love in a way that hasn't happened for a long time-- if ever. I am overwhelmed with gratitude to those who told me to believe and to the patience to take the Long View, which I am sure that God has been kind enough to grant me.
Walking through the grocery store this afternoon, I was struck by the thought that, while the life I built with my own hands and judged to be good may in some ways be gone, (constituted, such as it was, by a faith in my own ability to control my surroundings), the life that has been breathed into me in the middle of the darkness is constituted by something that I will never sense through searching and never know by thinking.