Birthday Musings

Poem, Reflections, Prompt

[Untitled]

Trees cast naked shadows,
long lines of ink
across the dwindling green.

It will all be mud soon.
Bluegrass winters are brown and gray
with sporadic clatters of white—
ice, snow,
blossoms come too soon then dropped,
felled by late-arriving frost.

Everything feels too much too soon these days
or too little too late.
This moment is asking 
something of me, 
but what?

To pick up a shovel?
Swing a pick?
Or patch myself
into a quilt,
wrap warm around
the nearest flower?

Photo by Jack Blueberry on Unsplash

Musings

Today, I am turning 44—on the 4th! I’m not versed in the symbolic meanings of different numbers, but that’s a lot of fours, so naturally, I did a google search on the subject. Among the myriad hits was this relevant question, asked by googlers of yore: “What is God trying to tell me with 444?”

And guess what! Great news! There’s a helpful AI answer to that question right there on the search page, so not only do I not have to consult my own heart or wrestle with the Divine or read up on numerology, I don’t even have to choose a link to click on! This utter lack of friction will free me up to engage in any number of other passive and frictionless activities on my birthday.

Apparently, birthdays make me snarky. Hold on, let me find out why . . .

ChatGPT: That’s actually a really common (and very human) reaction. Birthdays can stir up a lot of mixed feelings—and “snarky” often comes out as a defense mechanism or emotional shorthand for something deeper.

Me: Actually, I think maybe it’s just because my period is about to start and the world is a dumpster fire.

ChatGPT: That’s . . . extremely fair [grinning sweating face emoji].

Honestly, that combo—hormonal chaos plus global chaos—can make anything feel like too much. When you’re already running low on emotional bandwidth, even something that’s “supposed” to be fun (like a birthday) can just feel like another thing demanding energy you don’t have.

If you want, we can unpack ways to make birthdays less annoying when they come around—or I can just sit in the “yeah, everything a dumpster fire” space with you for a bit. What do you feel like right now: venting, distraction, or a little comfort?

Wow, I feel so heard disturbed. I mean, if all of those words came out of the mouth of a friend or acquaintance, that might be lovely. But artificial intelligence, which (to my knowledge) does not menstruate, just feigned empathy for hormonal fluctuations and then, despite its lack of a body and lack of emotions, offered to sit with me.

Are we heading into a world in which we still stop asking one another for emotional support? A world in which we might lose our capacity to sit with one another because AI can supposedly relieve us of that vulnerability? The thought gives me the heebie jeebies and also a touch of the weepies. Isn’t the messy tangle of our interconnectedness the thing that makes life beautiful? Isn’t our humanness kinda the point of being human? If we expunge or outsource all of that, what are we doing here?

I have two favorite birthday traditions from childhood. They’re so tiny and human and insignificant, but so warm and bright, at least in memory. The first is the birthday-kid-gets-the-first-bite-of-dessert tradition, which in a family with five kids played out like this. Kids salivate, watching Mom slowly, laboriously cut and serve seven pieces of cake. Hours later, when there is finally a plate in front of each famished child, all eyes turn to Birthday Kid. Birthday Kid grins devilishly, digs fork into cake, lifts cake to mouth. Siblings do the same, trailing a half second behind, at which point Birthday Kid abruptly pauses, cake mere millimeters from lips. Birthday Kid opens mouth, cake enters but does not actually touch teeth or tongue or walls of mouth. Birthday Kid pulls fork out, removes still intact bite of cake. Siblings groan. Birthday Kid repeats process, feasts on absolute power until sated, then proceeds to ingest cake, thereby finally, finally granting hunger-deranged siblings the right to eat as well.

In hindsight, I guess this tradition wasn’t all warm giggles. It was also a turn-taking game of Haves and Have-Nots, of power and powerlessness, and most of the time, any single one of us was hungry, drooling, and longing for power we didn’t possess.

Birthday tradition two, which I’ve passed on to my own kids, is the Hot-Cold Game. It goes like this. Wrapped birthday presents get hidden around the house. In order to find them, Birthday Kid moves about, while the rest of the family offers up verbal cues like “warmer,” “colder,” “hot,” “freezing,” or “BLAZING HOT” in response to Birthday Kid’s proximity to the gift in question. If Birthday Kid stands still, they get no verbal feedback—no clues about what to do next. Knowledge comes through movement—whether that movements ends up being in the “right” direction or the “wrong” one.

Maybe this is just birthday-period-dumpster-fire brain talking, but it seems to me that these two memories/traditions mirror something about the moment we’re living in and the way I’m trying to live it. On the one hand, we have rampant inequality and injustice. Billionaires, morally bankrupt politicians, and their cronies are swimming in cake. But it isn’t enough for them to merely possess cake. They want to possess cake at us. They want to possess cake over us. Power, which we all intrinsically possess and which grows when we work together, isn’t enough for them. What they crave is power over.

In our childish birthday games, the Birthday Kid always did finally take that bite of cake. I don’t remember anyone dragging it out to the point of tears or blows (though perhaps my parents’ memories would be crisper on that front). In the “real” world, the rules of the game are being steadily eroded and manipulated to extend and amplify the hunger of the many, all for the pleasure and power-lust of the few.

I keep asking myself what this moment is asking of me. How do I respond? What do I have to offer? What do I need to learn? I feel like that birthday kid—moving in one direction, then another, listening around me and feeling within me for the cues of “warmer” and “colder.” There are patches of “blazing hot”—and also times when I lose the trail altogether. Sometimes I wish for a tidy line. A clear plan—one that could be organized in bullet points and regurgitated by AI. Do X, Y, and Z, and injustice will end. Mix A and B with a dash of C and D, and fascism will fall like an underbaked cake. But if something is worth doing, it’s worth doing (with all the mess and uncertainty and humanness that entails). What I mean is that I’m pretty sure we’re meant to live our questions, not merely ask them, or else, how will we ever be able to live the answers?

On a related note, I’m pretty sure we’re meant to live into our questions together—meant to sit together in the uncertainty, sit together in the mess, sit together in our humanness and our disagreements and our inextricable interconnection. Surely, that sitting together is already part of the answer—the first and most essential answer to any political or societal question we might pose. We need one another. We need warm bodies at our side. It’s no surprise, then, that the Powers Over are working so hard to divide, distance, and distract us.

To the extent that I’m finding any kind of enduring answer to the question of what this moment is asking me personally, it’s simply this: that I need to come together with others, to sit together with people whom I immediately recognize as kin as well as people whom I kinda sorta wanna kick in the shins. It’s that I need to come together and bring along every scrap of compassion and curiosity and humor and creativity that I possess, trust that everyone else possesses these too, and lean into the messy uncertainty of what might emerge between us. I keep picturing people together around a fire. Or under the stars. Always, there is darkness. Always, a shared yearning for light. And always, hands working together to create . . . something.

I apologize if this post has been overly self-indulgent. As you may have noticed, I’m trying to figure things out by saying/writing them out loud. Thank you for sitting with me. If you have any wisdom or experiences to share related to community building or gatherings that you’ve been a part of that have felt nourishing, generative, or transformative, please lay it on me. Or tell me about how you’re feeling called to show up in the world right now. I’d love to learn from your perspectives and experiences.

And if you’d like a prompt to play with, loves, then here you go . . .

The Prompt

For today’s prompt, I invite you to settle into a space of literal darkness—the darker, the better. Make yourself comfortable there—sit on a cushion in a closet or curl up on your couch after sundown with all the lamps turned off. Spend a few minutes doing nothing apart from experiencing the darkness around you. How do your senses respond to the absence of light? How about your mind? Your body? Your emotions?

From here, choose your own adventure. You might stay in physical darkness and begin writing a poem—any poem! Follow whatever spark flares up inside you, no matter how insignificant it might seem, and jot down the words that comes, trusting yourself to be able to decipher them later on, though they likely won’t live up to your normal standard of handwriting. Or if you prefer, you might move back into an illuminated space and simply take the word “darkness” or your experience of it as a prompt to play with.

If you’d like to share what you come up with, I’d be delighted to read it. Think of the comments thread as our own fire circle. Thank you for being here, with all of your darkness and all of your light.