Birthday Beginnings

Beginnings are almost always endings, except one. Even that, when viewed backwards, is an ending of sorts.

I started my day reflecting on this particular piece, and though it's written regarding a Summer Day, I deemed it appropriate birthday-day material:

The Summer Day

Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean-

the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

~Mary Oliver

(from New and Selected Poems, 1992)

Tell me what it is you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?Isn't this what birthdays are really about? And life?  I look back through my journals and I chronicle the year's happenings in glossy black ink along machine-made lines. What have I really accomplished this year; what wild things? I took a brief stroll beneath the melting sky, contemplating the piles of rapidly melting snow like Poe counted his golden sands and Eliot his coffee spoons. 

Fingers plucking at guitar strings

sound out the many things

the raindrops found
when they learned 

they cannot breathe.

what a life, borne of sky and falling,

falling, friends all around

I fell a raindrop,
become a river where
might this journey be bound?

If I could trade everything I am for the pearl, well, I still wouldn't have enough - can you pay the price of life, without giving more than one, and love?