It's significant that I write this on the day that, hallelujah, we have finally passed a health care reform bill that allows the suffering among us some relief. Since many so-called ordinary people are suffering in this time of sweeping economic changes, largely challenging if not negative, this is saying something about how important it is, for a change, to put the better angels of our nature in charge of decisions with wide and forward-reaching consequences.

My sister emailed this morning to ask, "Where were you when this historic moment happened?" I was asleep, actually, having watched and waited until I couldn't any more. But in the morning, I raced to hear the news...and wept with gratitude. This means, for the first time in more than a year of sudden twists and turns of inhospitable fate, in which my life has been dramatically changed, I feel genuine relief.

I was thisclose to falling between the cracks, and I wasn't alone. Many people I know and love dearly are also hanging onto their lives by a narrow margin. One unexpected illness, one inch away, from a catastrophic economic plunge from which recovery will take a very long time. I'd not seen this coming. Most of us hadn't. One economic domino fell, and then another, and another. Suddenly people with hard-won professions were navigating a sea of despair, watching clients who needed life rings float off toward an unknown horizon. I lost people with whom I've had long-term, supportive relationships, not because of any disruption in those relationships, but because they couldn't afford to pay for my services and I was already giving away as many of them as I could afford.

A woman whose daughter had died too young and left her infant to be raised by her mother, who had to give up her job to take on this task. An unimaginable life change. A woman whose sister is dying. Another's husband. A mom of 3 small children who is being psychologically abused by the man she trusted to share her life. Someone who is raising her boys alone and has to change jobs to preserve her integrity. These are just a few of the people I've watched fall through the cracks this year.

And I've fallen through a few myself. I made some decisions at a time when those decisions seemed both appropriate and good, that turned around to bite me, badly. I had rented out my home with a plan in place that disintegrated almost as soon as I moved my last things out of the house and turned the key over to the family living there in my place. I was fortunate to be given temporary shelter by family members while I helped out in a family crisis, and gathered my scattered wits to discern my next step.

But the next step took me in only one direction at the time, a direction that was never on my life map. David Whyte, the poet-philosopher, speaks of the "seasonality" of Life, what it hands us to deal with, when. I was in a new season, a new territory, and a new economic reality, all at once. And someone forgot to provide me (as it also forgot to provide my clients) with a new GPS system to find the way home. What this meant for them I have yet to know, since the time still hasn't come for us to reconnect. What it's meant for me is that I'm living 1600 miles from the ones I love most in the world because, here, there is paid work for me to do, and, here, I can (barely) afford to pay my health insurance.

It also means I missed the first time my grandson crawled, or said, "Mama." It means I see him only every 10-12 weeks, and only when I've worked very hard to earn the plane fare. It means my heart aches with longing to see him every week and chronicle his changes for myself instead of hearing about them over the phone or through email.

In May, he will have his first birthday. My daughter called this morning with the good news that there will be a place for me to stay if I fly north for this. A brief respite from this haunting sense of homelessness.

It's been an enormous emotional and financial challenge to fall between the cracks, to be a middle class American citizen whose life has taken one unfortunate curve in the path, and is still picking my way through thicket and thorns to regain some semblance of the peaceful life path I tumbled off a year ago. It's been just as challenging to watch my daughter---a bright and beautiful young woman with two Master's degrees and an incredibly healing touch with children---try to make a life out of the shards of her dreams, unexpectedly shattered the day her baby was born.

Yes. We are fortunate to be among the world's most privileged citizens. We have access to opportunities two-thirds of the human family do not. And, yes, it's true that we are bowed but not broken. Nevertheless, to fall between the cracks into a seasonality we are unprepared to face, and yet we must, is to be forced to find the spiritual grit of which we're made. Some of us will do this; others will not. If this is a test. not all of us will pass.

But the health care reform bill DID pass last night. It guarantees health care to people who have been without, or are only a breath away from being without. It means that people can see their doctors and therapists again. It means the self-employed can finally exhale. It signals the return of compassion and other-centeredness in a world that's been all too harsh, self-indulgent and unforgiving for too many.

For this small wonder, I'm grateful today.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Meredith Jordan,