Ah, birthdays.  We all have them.  Last week I celebrated mine.

     Birthdays are an occasion to rejoice.  They re also an occasion to ponder.  Many years ago, when 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.  Though I still believe that life is a promise and expectation of river and ocean coming constantly together in a creation I did not really make, and that, furthermore, we--all of us--are poems, beautiful and gripping poems of existence, I also know that unless we are poems set in a framework of transcendent purpose, destiny, and conclusion, we miss the whole point.

    Happy birthday to all.