"I used to think maybe you loved me now baby I'm sure." — Katrina & The Waves

It is an unseasonably warm day on the coast of Maine. The sun is bearing down like a heat lamp warming the mudflats and our bones to the core as if in an act of contrition for these long months of awaiting her arrival. The air vibrates with the subtle sound of creatures humming in unison—their chirps, bleeps and whistles coming together like the universal sound of Om that goes on beneath the buzz of daily living. And then the subtlety of the undertone is broken—an expansive gust of wind passing through and bringing forth the textured scent of salty sea air that can only be brewed in these parts. I am sitting within these rhythms and noticing as my own work shifts away from the yang energy of the studio creation that has had me in her grasp these last months into this place of greater stillness and reflection.

Today is the first day of a new year. The numbers that make up my age seem backward—two high for my young heart. I have been thinking about what it means to celebrate being a human and what it means to be celebrated. I have been thinking about how I might strip away the many needs and notions that are piled upon us—upon me—in this tightly constructed world and discover what is truly essential, what will matter in the end—those things that invoke meaning and connection and joy. I recently had a conversation with a little girl—a soon to be six year old—about her own coming birthday. She is a Gemini Twin like me—wide eyed and gentle. She frequently asks her mother to stop into churches so that she may look around—she just feels drawn there. She looked at me and she said with a deep seriousness and wonder in her eyes, “do you know that your birthday is the day that you were boooorn?” She drew out the word born long and with the awe and gravity this more valuable notion deserves.

Just a few days ago my toes felt like they were frozen solid and my feet—prematurely donning sandals—were heavy like clubs in the cold as I ran the bases after a minor league baseball game. I had gone down to the field with a group of children while some friends had stayed up at the top of the stadium where we had been invited to be in a friend’s box seats for the day. The stadium had mostly cleared out but we were returning to the box to gather our things. Some of the children—including my son Jonah and that same little Gemini girl—decided to take the upper deck approach to our box while I ran along the bottom deck in a parallel trajectory. Across the stadium, music was booming—loud and clear. It seemed that there were only the three of us there in the stadium. The three of us and the music. Jonah—so agile and self-assured—especially in his physicality, ran from step to step to step, up and up and up into the stadium he ran with such confidence, his friend behind him like a butterfly—light and free. “I’m walking on sunshine, woah oh!” the words to the song sang out— like a soundtrack to their running, expanding my heart and my mind with each verse. They were zigging and zagging now, “and don’t it feel good!” They were running and they were living and I was taking them in and I was celebrating their being so very alive as the words of the song penetrated my heart and soaked me in gratitude for being a witness to this miracle of their existence—just being them. Alive. On this earth. Just living. “I feel the love, I feel the love, I feel the love that’s really real.”