{Time now, it flies by. The days and months and years blend into one another. The words seem to take a backseat more than they should. This post was written on October 8th – my 39th birthday. It was a response to my post from last year, when the morning of my birthday found me desolate and heartbroken and questioning everything.
As time rushes by and the days blur to months blur to another year past – I found myself wondering at all that can happen in the span of a year. And instead of waking up sad, I was merely waking up -with the whole depth and breadth of life inside of me.
What better birthday gift than that – another day to live and honor and write. So here this is, a month belated, yes – but still straight from me to you}
15 things to do when you wake up on your 39th birthday
1. Begin to wake up in the hour before your alarm, as you always do. When you do, without opening your eyes, let yourself find the space that has been made for you. Curve into curve and warmth into warmth. Feel what it is to come awake with her, slowly, and then all at once. Roll over, kiss her good morning and thank you and yes please. Begin your day.
2. Honor the path of the last year. Bless the tears on the hard floor. Bless the way the ocean saved your life. Bless the ring on finger and the friends who came and stayed. Bless the bike path and your burning legs and the freedom of balance. Bless the picking yourself up off the ground and the writing the words that hurt the most and the healing you found, right there.
3. Trace the ink placed on ribs one year ago. I am this, body and soul. Yes, you are.
4. Do not yet make the appointment for the next tattoo. The words will mark the year that has passed and the woman that you have become and the one who will be born next have been chosen, yes. You know what they are, but the time is not yet right. You will know when it is.
5. Pick them up from school and gather them close. Not pulling yourself into some semblance of okay from a space of broken, but as full and whole and knit together of your own power. Not better or worse that a year before – just different. As one who had journeyed through the fire and come out to tell a million different stories. Know that one day they will light their own fires and burn down and rise again. Thank the universe for the transformative wonder of that.
6. Rose quartz and red jasper around your neck. As always. Unconditional love and the most solid ground. It is all, really, that you ever need.
7. Follow the roadmap of memory that carried you through. Trace the lines of sad and the heartbreak. Navigate the healing and honor the fault lines that divide what was from what is to come. Send wishes that all was and is as it should and must and will be. Trust that it is so.
8. Drive to work – to the place that you never wanted to go and fought with all your might. Know that this too has become another home, another space to grow and learn and shine, full of lessons and living and honest effort. Sometimes it is the spaces we most fight embracing that have the most to teach.
9. Choose staying. Choose openness and grace and honesty and compassion. Choose her and them and this. Be the one to walk onto the bridge and extend your hand, without expectation but with every last hard earned ounce of hope. Be solid in that space and know that you will be met, maybe not as you expected or dreamed – but met in the way that you most need.
10. Do not deny where your heart travels this day. It is as honest and good and true as it ever was and as the path to your mother ocean always is. Nothing will ever change that. Send out a wish and an offering and trust that it will be felt and heard and known.
11. Remember how the greatest and most transformative grace has always been delivered by the most broken open spaces. Be grateful for the broken, and for the tears and for the grace that sustains. It is because of all of that that you are as you are.
12. Light the red candles. Let ink flow on page. This day will never be complete without an honest spilling – a truth telling shared only between you and black ink and white paper. Speak there the barest truth of your heart. Nobody will read, but the blood red hunters moon will know. She always does. There is comfort in that.
13. Honor your wild. Your wolf. Your hard earned howl. It is this year that brought you to her, the unfettered and unleashed you that is finding herself more and more each day. She knows the raw and the grit and the lonely and she teaches you of your power. You owe her much.
14. Survey your space. All that you have built and designed and created with your own hands and heart. This home you have made. The things that fill it, full of beauty and function and purpose. That section of hard wood floor before your altar where you sobbed the deepest tears for hours upon hours and cracked wide open. The white sheets that held both the birth of dreams and their ultimate surrender. The red wax spill of late night candle burn. The doorway where you downed the whiskey and watched the smoke rise into the night sky. The sofa where they played their guitars together and you glimpsed a future. The stacks of books and the spaces where the stories hide between their pages. The way the morning light is familiar as are the deepening shadows of night. Know that it is all yours, as is the whole of this life. It is yours and it is good.
15. Look back over the year that has passed. Look forward on what is to come. Bless it all – not with saccharine gratitude, but the kind of raw and holy blessing that honors the blood and guts and gore and heat and sex and hard work and giving up and giving in and the howl of loss and burning down and rising again. Bless every last sacred bit – it’s the stuff from which a life is built. Your life. The only one you will ever have.
Blessed be the end of things and blessed be the beginning. Blessed be the passage of time and the healing it brings. Blessed be another year on this earth and another broken heart and the knitting back together that followed. Blessed be the love that comes when it is least expected. Blessed be the lessons of choice. Blessed be the grace. Blessed be the long nights and the mother ocean and the path from there to here and the inner compass that carried you. Blessed be the family and the home and what been built.
Blessed be. Blessed be. Blessed be.
