Birthday Reflections

Dear Me, it's my brithday.

Time to get self-reflective!

In honor of this day of utmost importance, I am sharing a self-reflective photo (or two), which coincidentally matches the the theme of The View From Here this week. Tada... a photo of myself taking a photo of myself.

Today I have been alive 31 years. This is not a major milestone or anything particularly exciting at all. At all.

In fact, my husband is away coaching a basketball tournament somewhere in China and my kids don't understand birthdays void of decorations and cake so there is little tadoo going on around here.

So even though I don't really want to go over-the-top and recap the whole meaning of my life and these 31 years of it, I do have some tiny little thoughts about it all.

My life is the people in it. There is never really much that is more important than people.

It is life to know them, to be known by them.

My life is the places I have lived, and the people that were there, that are there.

The ho-hum town of Highland, Indiana.

The mountains of Wyoming.

The streets of Philadelphia (you're all singing it now aren't you)

this coastal city in China.

It is the things I do every day with my hands

the prayers I offer up from my soul

sometimes just with words that flutter silently from my mind

sometimes with the bones and gristle work of my flesh

and an uttering from my limbs that begs it to mean something.

It is the words I read and mull over

but want to breathe like life from my body.

I read this line the other day in Tolstoy's War and Peace and it  has rattled around in my head for days:

It was as though the infinite, fathomless arch of heaven that had once stood over him had been suddenly transformed into a low, limited vault weighing upon him, with everything in it clear, but nothing eternal and mysterious.

I understand the desire for the vault.

But to be shaped by the arches of heaven,

that is life indeed.

(Guess the whole "not re-capping the meaning of life" part didn't go so well...)