Celebration Is Sacred and It’s My Birthday! (Plus a Gift for You)

Today is my birthday. I’m turning thirty five.

My mom says she saw a shooting star the night I was conceived. I bet there was a shooting star  the night you were conceived as well.

I notice two common trends in how people relate to their birthdays.

1. They down play it, don’t mention it, and resist celebration.

2. They (once over the age of about twenty eight) stop talking about how old they are turning.

Both these trends stem from two mistaken notions.

1. Celebration has to be earned.

2. Becoming older is unattractive and some how diminishing.

Believe these things at your own risk! Believe these things and they will be true in your experience. But they are wrong.

Celebrating life because it is, because here we are, because we were born on this precious blue planet and a whole year has circled round again for us, is sacred. We are honoring not only our life but our interconnected beingness with family, friends, food, air, water, and cake!

And growing older…well don’t be deceived by the small minded notions of aging we are force fed in this culture. Sure, let melancholy and sadness wash over you for moments of joy and love now lived and past, turn your experience and feelings over in the compost of your life soil, but remember what you were before you were born, and how little you know not only of death but even of the rest of the day.

May we revel in this unknown.

I’ve already been celebrating my birthday for days—with special dates, swims across ponds, hikes around lakes, making art and cooking. I’ve got at least another week and a half of being fêted.

And so today, on my actual birthday, I’m having a quiet day.

I’m going to go to a gentle yoga class and go slower than everyone else, and then to an acupuncture appointment where I can lie looking out the window at gardens and birds, and then I don’t know….swimming, weeding, walking, but most of all listening, listening to the soft silence that surrounds us all and soaking in the voice of the earth.

For my birthday here is a gorgeous song celebrating life from my favorite movie, As It Is In Heaven.

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I am giving away two copies of the book Outside The Garden. This is a limited edition book of my poems and my sister Rosy Lamb’s paintings. If you would like to enter the drawing for one of these copies simply tweet this post (include my twitter handle @allislistening) or share it on facebook. Or if you are outside the social media madness simply send me an email or post a comment here and I’ll add your name to the hat.

It has given me deep pleasure reading Outside The Garden. In fact, I have read “Eve Wanted God” so many times that I suspect it is now part of my DNA (along with my penchant for red wine and dark chocolate). —Susan Mann