Today, I celebrate my birthday.  And, by many standards, it's a significant one.  Birthdays are the stuff of existence.  Birthdays herald, birthdays announce, they herald, they demarcate and divide.  Birthdays ground the shapes and patterns of our lives.  They also remind us of the fragility 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.  At the time I turned twenty-two, 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 then saw it, could only be meaningful if it spoke of transcendence.

    So it is today.  Otherwise, nearly fifty years later, although I still believe all of us to be poems, beautiful and gripping poems of existence, unless we are poems with transcendent purpose, destiny, and conclusion, we miss the whole point.

    Happy birthday.