Episode 34: Birth Days
Hi everyone, I hope you’re doing as well as you can be today. This week’s poem and episode explore the myriad of emotions, memories, thoughts, and feelings that surface and coexist on our birthdays. Though birthdays are often thought of and marketed as celebratory, this dismisses the many painful ways people encounter their birthday, or the fact that not everyone’s experience includes cake, balloons, singing, friends, family, parties, and presents. As with any milestone, birthdays can be marked and haunted by emptiness and feelings that we haven’t accomplished or fulfilled our purpose enough (among other things). This poem attempts to reframe birthdays in a supportive way.
I’ll share it with you now:
At midnight on my fortieth,
by way of my internet browser,
I stepped into the painting
Wheatfield With Crows
where there was nothing
to distinguish one day from the next.
Escaping into kindred comfort
(a weird counterintuitive safety, I know),
this was fine by me because
another birthday in the basement
reminded me that the only things
changing were a few numbers
& everyone’s growing tiredness
of my sadness & defeat.
What I carried &
could not complete or let go of
came with me to Auvers,
France, July 1890,
even though there was, of course,
no cell service & no Vincent.
But what could be parted with
was left on the coffee table:
keys & credit cards & chargers.
As 1 pm approached—
the time of day I was born—
I felt the boredom of it:
no seasonal shift…
no daylight shift…
So I began plaiting
my braids with wheat
and then grain beetles
and then their tiny feet
until I saw smaller, still,
spotlighting the illusion
that the broader picture—
the static painting we’re taught
to value most—seems to remain
eternally unchanged.
And I wondered,
what if birthdays were every day
rather than once a year?
If every day were one of birth?
Because more days for birth
means more soil space for seasonal joy
and the way it changes & charges us.
There’s always something more.
Always something different.
Always something to celebrate.
And then I saw the muscular crows
gliding above wheat fields
like blankets of gold
and it wasn’t until they dove
that I asked them, gently,
to please fly me home.
Breathe the words in. What do they make you feel or think? How did they connect with your senses? What colours or symbols did you notice? What meaning did you draw? Metaphors? Interpretations? Clarity? Messages?
