On Saturday, I turned fifty-six.
I made it around the sun one more time. So often, in our culture, we try to escape aging. Ads often promote and tout their age defying properties. Why? I am comprised of all the years, and I am still myself at every age. I don't want to deny or defy that, I want to own that. Each one is a gift and a blessing, no matter how hard of a year it was. Each shaped and crafted my spirit into who I am now. I am grateful for each one.
I awakened that morning as I always do and went to the kitchen to make myself some coffee. As I entered the kitchen, I noticed a male house finch with his red head and breast eating seeds from my window bird feeder. Not wanting to scare him off, I stopped and just watched him enjoy his breakfast. It was only after he flew away that I made my coffee.
While it was brewing, I gazed out the kitchen window at the bloom of the early morning light. As I stood there, I thought about how I was older than my Mother was when she died. Birthdays can often be tinged with continued grief. Certainly as I looked out at my garden, I thought of how she loved to garden, spending hours tending to and nurturing her own in the hopes of creating an English garden. Mine, however, is more on the side of a wild garden, created and crafted not only for beauty but to attract bees and butterflies and birds.
Later in the morning, while it was still cool, I went out to work in my garden; clearing out a poorly neglected and weed filled bed. I go to nature to learn the purity of living - of getting out of my own head and into the world around me. Getting out a shovel, a hoe, a rake, and a pickax, I started to clear away weeds and roots and brush.
My cell phone rang, I stopped to answer it. It was my sister calling to wish me happy birthday. “What are you doing to celebrate?” she asked.
I told her I was redoing an untended bed in my garden.
She laughed. “That is so you.”
At intervals, I would pause to take a break, to drink some water from my thermos, and just sit on the grass. I was fifty-six but what was that to the old oak in my yard that had been there for well over a hundred years? That oak has been anchored in time no less than the earth. How many families had it provided shade for over the years?
I spotted a sparrow and, immediately, thought of the lines by William Carlos Williams:
This sparrow who comes to sit at my window is a poetic truth.
This sparrow as a poetic truth.
I love to see the world as a poem. An often beautiful, often heartbreaking poem.
Every morning, one of my sacred rituals is to begin the day by reading a poem. It just so happened on my birthday that I read Mary Oliver’s poem “The Summer Day.” Most know it only for its final line:
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
I thought about this very line as I was lying on the grass, listening to birdsong, and gazing up at the sky. I think Mary Oliver would have approved of my choice.
A yellow swallowtail butterfly danced about the branches of the old oak.
A chipmunk hurried about the rock wall.
Noticing two caterpillars hanging from the underside of two leaves, getting ready to enclose themselves in their chrysalises before becoming butterflies.
The scent of the Sweet Betsy Bush, which I took a cutting from one of the ones my grandparents had and whose smell reminds me of the time I spent with them.
The older I get, the more I have replaced certainty with wonder. I don’t have to have answers to my questions but that each question helps me to think more deeply, more creatively, more expansively. I love that I live in a world where a group of butterflies is called a kaleidoscope. A group of hummingbirds are called a shimmer, a bouquet, a glittering, or a tune. Somehow knowing this makes the world more beautiful, more magical.
With each year, I find I have less of a desire to impress people and more of a desire to connect with them, to know their story. I like to stop and ask one of my neighbors, an older woman, about her garden, which easily puts mine to shame. First we talk about plants and gardening, but then it often turns to her life. There are times her stories are more lovely than the poppies and the coneflowers and the asters.
She, like myself, believes that gardening is a hopeful act. “I don’t know if I will live to see another season, another Spring,” she tells me, “but I plant and tend my garden with the hope that the beauty will still be here long after I’m gone.” Gardening is a hopeful act. When I am working in my own garden, I am thinking not just of this Spring, this year, but one year, two years and more. I see a garden that is not only before me but also one that I want to imagine and work towards. It is a small way of adding to the beauty of this world
Hope and beauty are vital in a world that is filled with fear, cynicism, and violence. There are times I see what is going on in parts of the world and I weep. It feels so overwhelming and hopeless. I feel helpless. What can I, in my small corner of this world, offer of any value? Then I think of Anne Frank writing, “I've found that there is always some beauty left - in nature, sunshine, freedom, in yourself; these can all help you.” I share beauty, share wonder, share hope in the fervent desire that it can touch or help even one life. Isn’t that what we’re here for? George Eliot thought so when she wrote, “What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?”
The older I get, the more that is my ambition. Not for success or fame or wealth or accolades.
I dig in the soil and it is good for my soul because it connects me to the earth again. It reminds me that I came from this soil and to this soil I will return. It reminds me that in the brevity of life is its beauty. Each moment is a precious gift that is not guaranteed. As someone who once nearly took his own life, I see this now. It’s also a choice, something I have to decide. Just like hope, just like curiosity, just like wonder.
I tell my students whenever we go outside or on a field trip, find four things that you noticed and, when we come back to class, tell me about them. It’s a way to get them, and remind myself, to be present to our surroundings. I love listening to what they have seen and how excited they can get about it.
The Polish author Bruno Schulz, who was shot by a Nazi officer, once wrote, “My ideal goal is to ‘mature’ into childhood. That would be genuine maturity.” I believe he was right. Why? Because he is not referring to childishness but that childhood curiosity and wonder that sees magic and delight in everything. In that sense of play, which is serious and how they begin to connect with and understand the world. Children ask questions, without worrying about how they appear when asking it. Being around them helps me remember this.
I am fifty-six. Only four years from sixty.
The dreams I had for my life as a kid have not come to pass, but they have been replaced by new ones that are less focused on accumulating money and possessions and more about accumulating memories and experiences. I find I am not focusing on what I don’t have or on where I haven’t been, but on appreciating what I do have and where I am.
Right then, in that moment, on my fifty-sixth birthday, I appreciated that there was no sobriety in the glory of Springtime.
A bee is asleep on the petal of one of my purple Irises, nectar-drunk and pollen-heavy.
My New Dawn Rose bush is covered in delicate light pink blossoms.
The honeysuckle has begun to bloom
I notice a house wren hopping about in the branches of a nearby tree.
Small pleasures aren’t so small, aren’t so mundane. They each contain miracles. The mere fact that I exist, that these birds, these trees, these plants, that any of this exists is, in itself, a mind-blowing miracle. Yet, like Laura Ingalls Wilder, “I am beginning to learn that it is the sweet, simple things of life which are the real ones after all.”
I am fifty-six.
I am grateful for each and every year. Even the really hard ones. I am grateful for the common blessings each day offers, the grace and gladness, the sorrow and song, the breath and heartbeat of each moment. I am grateful for the sunshine and the blue sky and the breeze and the birdsong. I am grateful for each happiness and kindness, in the quietude and tranquility, in the stillness and the busyness. To live, the best way to live, is to appreciate it all, every moment that passes, in the everyday things around us where beauty and wonder lie.
This is such a beautiful piece and captures aging and being in the world so beautifully. At my young age of 61 it really resonated with me. Thank you for sharing it.
Happiest of birthdays. Thank you for taking us on this journey of such sustained attention. It was a gift.