For my dear friend, sun-sign Virgo, I wish you a beautiful day that lasts forever. Thank you for sharing your stories, joy, sorrow. Thank you for gracing me and this world with your words – fantastical and sonorous.
This morning I told a housemate that it’s my friend’s birthday. This friend has stayed in the house since June, and she goes back to the States very soon. The housemate asked, “Does she celebrate birthdays? Not everyone does.” I replied, “For birthdays, I impose my joy on others.”
He laughed, especially since our opposite personalities reflect the glass half-full and half-empty metaphor. Nonetheless, I heard him wish her a happy birthday before he left for work this morning. I heard laughter pass between them, which made me smile.
Days shorten and years quicken for every birthday that arrives. Each one is a time to celebrate our spirit, mind, body, and the path behind, beneath, and before us. Each one is an opportunity for reflection and rejuvenation.
Unfortunately, certain ideologies cast a menacing shadow across aging. Anti-aging products destroy the lessons of wrinkles. Lines of time are earned; they are marks of survival; they honor our bodies with stories.
I don’t deny that aches are pains. But birthdays are memories of birth, an entrance of life unto possibility. These are memories to celebrate.
So today I celebrate my friend, sun-sign Virgo, and praise every physical indication of aging. While these marks are targets of sale by misguided marketers, each mark is beautiful and precious. In them I see your child self, the girl-become-woman who mothers her daughters, the inspired artist who writes her dreams into reality, and the elder you are and are becoming.
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Post updated: 28 January 2009.
Celebration by Melissa Dey Hasbrook is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.
