Today, I celebrate my birthday.  And, by many standards, it's a significant one.   How so?

     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, I now believe that unless we are poems with transcendent purpose, destiny, and conclusion, we miss the whole point.