Earlier this week, I celebrated my birthday.  Big deal:  we all do!  Nonetheless, birthdays are the stuff of existence.  In them, we began.  Birthdays announce, they herald; they divide and demarcate; they ground the shapes and patterns of our lives.  They represent rhythm and consistency, yet they also remind us of the helplessness we all inhabit:  we cannot predict how many birthdays we will know before we know them no more.

     The year I turned twenty-two, I was in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.  I had just emerged from four months of backpacking in the Canadian Rockies and was now traveling east,  taking a long way back to the States.  Given all that was happening in the world and the majesty of the mountains in which I had been, my birthday seemed a very little mark in a very large canvas.

     

     It still is.  All I could know is that life was a promise and expectation, an inkling and anticipation, a river and ocean coming constantly together in a creation I did not really make, a creation that, regardless of how I might have seen it, could only be meaningful if it spoke of transcendence.  Otherwise, though we are poems indeed, poems with a point, poems with a destiny, poems with a conclusion, we miss the bigger point.

     

     Birthday or not, life cannot define itself.