it is weird today, writing the date in class, november 13 2006 and it has been exactly 30 years since the day i was born. precious years full of strange and wonderful and alarming history in this time and place. i never would have imagined when i was ten and dreaming of six kids and 60 acres of land that at 30 i would still be starting out and not even a grown up yet, and surely not an architect or archeologist yet. such adventures await me! unrecorded, undocumented, unimaginable mysteries.
i will make every day new and beautiful. i will be in the moment. i will smile at everyone no matter who else needs to be cynical. i will grow younger and older all at once...wise and innocent. that is the glory of turning 30.
i love my wrinkles, forehead worries and laugh crinkles. my life has given me gifts that have made me me. my heatherness is what i hold dear inside me and what connects me inextricably from loved ones, those who shaped me, my amazingly kind and crazy mom and dad, my older sister who is familiar to me as the wind and my own skin, my three brothers who lead me rollicking down mountain paths and storytelling, darin who is true heartlovebrother of my soul. and all the others who are known and unknown yet to me who are forever connected to me in the mystery. i sign with gratitude at the blessings.
if you have time to read this amazing poem by dylan thomas, do. if not, read it when you turn 30, or any glorious day of life that you have time to absorb such grace:
"Poem in October" - dylan thomas
It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
And the mussel pooled and the heron
Priested shore
The morning beckon
With water praying and call of seagull and rook
And the knock of sailing boats on the webbed wall
Myself to set foot
That second
In the still sleeping town and set forth.
My birthday began with the water-
Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name
Above the farms and the white horses
And I rose
In a rainy autumn
And walked abroad in shower of all my days
High tide and the heron dived when I took the road
Over the border
And the gates
Of the town closed as the town awoke.
A springful of larks in a rolling
Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling
Blackbirds and the sun of October
Summery
On the hill's shoulder,
Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly
Come in the morning where I wandered and listened
To the rain wringing
Wind blow cold
In the wood faraway under me.
Pale rain over the dwindling harbour
And over the sea wet church the size of a snail
With its horns through mist and the castle
Brown as owls
But all the gardens
Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales
Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.
There could I marvel
My birthday
Away but the weather turned around.
It turned away from the blithe country
And down the other air and the blue altered sky
Streamed again a wonder of summer
With apples
Pears and red currants
And I saw in the turning so clearly a child's
Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
Through the parables
Of sunlight
And the legends of the green chapels
And the twice told fields of infancy
That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.
These were the woods the river and the sea
Where a boy
In the listening
Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy
To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.
And the mystery
Sang alive
Still in the water and singing birds.
And there could I marvel my birthday
Away but the weather turned around. And the true
Joy of the long dead child sang burning
In the sun.
It was my thirtieth
Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon
Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.
O may my heart's truth
Still be sung
On this high hill in a year's turning.