"There, in your hands, now…"

In Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? ©2011, Jeanette Winterson talks about her adopted mother and miracles:

She loved miracle stories, probably because her life was as far away from a miracle as Jupiter is from the Earth. She believed in miracles, even though she never got one-- well, maybe she did get one, but that was me, and she didn't know that miracles often come in disguise.

I was a miracle in that I could have taken her out of her life and into a life she would have liked a lot. It never happened, but that doesn't mean it wasn't there to happen. All of that has been a brutal lesson to me in not overlooking or misunderstanding what is actually there, in your hands, now. We always think the thing we need to transform everything-- the miracle-- is elsewhere, but often it is right next to us. Sometimes it is us, ourselves.