Quiet mornings in this house are one of my favorite things. Watching the sun trickle in through the thick of the forest. Hearing the rustling of the squirrels in the leaves and the plop, plop of acorns on the deck. Sometimes I can't even believe we live here - in the woods, on a mountain. A year later and it's still surreal to me. 

We dreamed of living here since the day we got married but we didn't know at the time that we weren't ready. There were lessons to be learned, places to see and some much needed growth and change had yet to take place. In a way we both had to have our comforts stripped away before we could really appreciate life here. 

By the time we arrived with nothing but hope and prayers we had learned to live from a place of gratitude and contentment. We had come into our own. I learned to be self-sufficient in the sense that I learned to rely on nothing other than God, my husband and myself. I learned to live for myself in the sense that I wasn't doing things to impress or please others - I was doing things that were in line with the person that I wanted to be. And most importantly I learned to give up control. For an extremely perfectionist, type A person as myself this was the hardest lesson to learn. And yet... I constantly repeat my dad's words to myself "All of life's anxieties come from us wanting life to perfect when it never is." Once I accept that life is and will be messy, unpredictable, hard and at times unfair, I find that I no longer fight life - I am able to embrace it. 

We still get frustrated, disappointed and plain old pissed off sometimes but we try to always come back to our blessings because we've learned that at the end of the day the most important things in life are constant and that is each other, our love, our family, our life. It may not amount to much on paper, or look very imposing and yet it's... everything.