Birthday Beginnings

Beginnings are almost always endings, except one. Even that, when viewed backwards, is an ending of sorts.

I started my day reflecting on this particular piece, and though it's written regarding a Summer Day, I deemed it appropriate birthday-day material:

The Summer Day

Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean-

the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

~Mary Oliver

(from New and Selected Poems, 1992)

Tell me what it is you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?Isn't this what birthdays are really about? And life?  I look back through my journals and I chronicle the year's happenings in glossy black ink along machine-made lines. What have I really accomplished this year; what wild things? I took a brief stroll beneath the melting sky, contemplating the piles of rapidly melting snow like Poe counted his golden sands and Eliot his coffee spoons. 

Fingers plucking at guitar strings

sound out the many things

the raindrops found
when they learned 

they cannot breathe.

what a life, borne of sky and falling,

falling, friends all around

I fell a raindrop,
become a river where
might this journey be bound?

If I could trade everything I am for the pearl, well, I still wouldn't have enough - can you pay the price of life, without giving more than one, and love?

Birthday Requests

For those of you who enjoy purchasing gifts for events and celebrating people, I want to make it perfectly clear that I want nothing (read: AbSoLuTeLy NoThInG kthxbye) for my birthday. I've asked each of my friends if, for my birthday, I should be able to do what I wanted instead of what everyone else deemed appropriate for my birthday. Every single one of them agreed with the concept until I told them what I considered the ideal birthday, and then every single one of them told me no, I could not have the birthday I wanted. So thanks for that, friends.

For those of you curious folks, here is the birthday I wanted: a nice get-together with all of my dearest of friends where, instead of receiving gifts and getting treated to dinner or dessert or whatever, I treat each of my friends to such. I buy a nice group dinner and perhaps have cards or gifts for everyone as a thank-you for loving me and granting me the grace of kindness and love that got me here. It’s my celebration of life, and why should I not celebrate it by rejoicing in those pieces of my heart that keep me beating through life?

I already decided that I’m going to (craftily) follow through with a portion of this, but I doubt that I’ll be granted all of it. Birthday mischief.

So, first and foremost: I want to receive nothing for my birthday. Yes, you heard me – nothing. A group of people read this and think to themselves, that’s impossible. Everyone wants to receive something. These are the gift givers: C, Matthew, S?, A, errr… (are most of my best friends gift givers? What have I done to deserve this… and how are they still friends with me?)

If you are still considering buying me a gift, please don’t. Settle for a card, or a heartfelt letter. I can’t tell you how much I prefer your words, stories, time, lives, and smiles over your gifts. Whew, now no one is still considering gifts, right? (Please, pretty please?)

So what DO I want? I want to see as many of my dearest of friends as possible. The whole of February is birthday month, and I know you are busy. Me, too. So, text me and let's get coffee or tea, or let's play bananagrams, or we could grab dinner, or kick around a soccer ball, or go on a light, freezing hike, or we could go to powells - I don't even care, I want to see everyone. These are my birthday wishes (pleas).

Thoughtful Thursdays

Blossoms of bliss breeze into burgeoning mists, billowing the day away. The horizon's a sunset lei, all carnation floret and orchid violet, a concealed twilit sky - cosset me in, oh, blanket of grey. Jasmine and trillium score my dreams in musical white and gaudy greens. In the morning, only wisp tails remain, ghosts aghast at blooming dawns, and fleeing, fleeting as ballooning spiders on gossamer trails.

Thursdays, Thor's days, though  scarcely as galvanic or striking as lightning, occasionally not unlike lying between a god's hammer and anvil. Today's music was broken, dissonant, merely a noise of decibels ground out in hours and ticking time.  A pandora's box of living, a burning punishment for a theft of fire.

The mornings are chilly, though the sun still slants through the sky. Fall is more agreeable when enamored with the symbols than the inclement weather, and expecting chills that eventually transform blankets into the womb of dreams, a warmth I'd rather never leave. Waking in the mornings, greeted by a night still charged with darkness, where is diligence and motivation? My scrawlings in my journal tortured and illegible, like crow claws dragged through ink. Why is a raven like a writing desk? Nevermore.

Tomorrow is my little brother's birthday. Happy birthday, little fellow. I'm ever praying that you turn out greater than I, faithful and true, honest and kind, a gentleman and a scholar, a believer in great and good dreams. May your tomorrow and all your tomorrow's tomorrows possess an irrevocable destination without falter. When you misstep, learn still greater things from these than even your triumphs, for this is the human experience. Test boundaries, for many exist only in imagination, and beyond those fences, illumination resides. Be ever wise.

Here are a couple of quotes for thorough Thoreau Thursdays.
Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.

What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.

I just wanted to write something worthwhile, and sleep isn't forthcoming. My muse is shivering and huddled near my heart, and my fingers are still typing. Sometimes, I just can't write anything I like. Tonight is such a night. I drank ginger beer (no alcohol... just ginger. who do you think I am?), ate stir fry, read, and sat before my computer, tabula rasa. I'm not thinking - am I,still? Oh, you silly sophist brain, sleep. Maybe tomorrow you can write.

Ghosts of Faces

ghosts of faces are passing by
past they fly
could they be your friends, or mine?
or I theirs? - it's fine
for on streets or trails there's no goodbyes
for passersby living their own lives
rarely intersecting lines

and what of friends in different places
gone ten million paces
witness distant times
sharing but a moon and stars
of the sky's -
not ours
mountains here, desert there
forests and valleys
or dunes and seas

our times may meet but never, or twice
And your eyes say,
I love
I fly
my spirit's a dove
you'll never watch scrape the sky
nor the tears,
it cries,
of the endless phantoms you never meet
never treat for cups of tea
or campfire retreats
where rivers run besides
and their stories, well
you can never tell
they might have changed your life
might have loved, too
if only you, they, had chanced to say
who are you?

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We celebrated my mother's birthday today. Surprisingly, the weather held. Here's to hoping it lasts a couple more days, so I might hike along the ridge or up a mountain on Wednesday. It does not look promising. We drove to the beach and went to a restaurant that mother dearly loves, and we all glanced out the windows over the ocean and into the water as the ducks paddled by, the jellyfish bounced their way through the waters, the seaweed drifted in its soggy swirls, and kayaks drifted by in the amiable waters. The sun gleamed off the waters and the windows of passing boats, fishing, drifting or sailing in the brine with sea breeze gently pushing at the waters.
Matthew is going to Korea, tomorrow, which is my last outside-the-house friend in Washington that I'm aware of (currently in the area discounting his family and my family - sorry if I forgot you). It will be quiet, perhaps, though I've long needed a little quiet. And how quiet is it really when the word games get crazy? When the card games with the family get joyful? Not. So. Silent.
Or when the coyotes howl with the distant neighbors huskies or when the wind races through the valley, stirring all the trees into frenzied whispers and wooden groans. It is a good sort of silence, and loudness. A restful set. Maybe I'll finish a few more books this week, too. Time for some creativity, time for some art, time for story magic and myth.