Happy Birthday to Me

I awoke this morning to the distant rumble of thunder- just one, long, low roll of it.  I take it as Mother Nature's sweet birthday gift to me- she knows I love storms.  She has a weird way of presenting her gifts.  This time last year, I was sitting in our warm kitchen in New Hampshire eating oatmeal, staring out the window at a frost-covered field and thanking my stars that I was lucky enough to be in a place that I love (to have found a place that I love) when a horse emerged from our dilapidated barn.

We did not have horses.

But that's Mother Nature for you.  I fed the horse an apple and sent it home.  This was life.

Now I am looking at another year and things have changed profoundly.  A beginning and an end.  But what is beginning and what is ending?  Summer has ended, fall begun, as of yesterday.  It signals the slowing down of the world- an increasingly introspective and quieter time of taking stock, storing goods, and preparing for winter.  Well, that was the original signaling of the fall.  Things have indeed changed these days.  But I am getting off-topic.  This is not a post about the inevitable tendencies of humans to change, destroy, and forget.  It's about birthdays.

Birthdays and seasonal change.  I am not one to make a huge deal of my own birthday.  I refuse to bake a cake for myself (I gleefully forced my roommate to do it this year), I tend to celebrate with my family, it is what it is.  But it necessarily had to be different this year.  Not that 27 necessitates anything special- no, not even close.  My birthday follows the Autumn Equinox every year, as I age this fact takes on more meaning.  This year it is another weird birthday present to me.  Because I can revel in the symbolism as it applies to my life.  The perfect balance of night and day was struck yesterday, a reminder that balance is universal, elemental, and not-so-subtlety lacking in my day-to-day existence.  It is an even more powerful, visceral reminder that time is the constant.  It moves everything.  It changes everything- seasons, heartache.  But it remains.  And I cannot exist outside of it, as I have been attempting for so many weeks and months now; I cannot protect myself enough to fool time.

Happy Birthday to Me.

Cheers Friends.