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shiredancerFirst things first:
HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOLLY!
I hope your day is fabulous, wonderful, special, delightful, and as full of joy and light as you are yourself. May all your wishes come true, sweetie.
It's Molly's birthday now, and it's mine too. She is twenty-eleven, and I am... thirty-nineteen. *Sigh* Let's just call it 49, shall we? A number that gives me pause. I've never, ever had issues with age before this past year. I have always welcomed every new year, and a number is just a number for a' that. (Hee, a bit of Bobby Burns, right? Or is it Kipling? Can't remember. See? There goes the memory.) And I'm not truly upset, but somehow feeling like I'm approaching 50 seems... wrong. If anything, I've regressed so far this past year into retro-adolescence that it's not even funny. (Wait, that's a lie -- it's pretty fecking hilarious most of the time.) People have noticed, you know. People have been downright *appreciative* -- my own brother says I've "come back", and my best RL friend is just delighted with my company of late. My stepsister-in-law was thrilled to find a companion-in-lust as we compared notes on just exactly what mid-life hormones were wreaking on us. And I have lots of good examples in front of me: friends who have passed the 50-year milestone so gracefully as to make it seem just beautiful. Two of them are actively belly-dancing at the Moroccan restaurant we ate at tonight to celebrate my day. Gorgeous, they are, and still such wonderful dancers it's unbelievable. Heh, they work out at the gym every day too. So, really, the age is just another number and just another slight adjustment to cope with. And the midlife crisis, the retro-adolescent fun? Well, I owe a debt of gratitude to The Lord of the Rings (the movie) for starting it off, and huge, huge love and thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
daisy_gamgee for really kicking it into gear, first with THoU and her warm, caring email letters, and then bringing me into LJ, where I met everyone else.
It was fun at the restaurant -- I had wine, got up and danced, ate good food in spite of the fact that I'm back on the frickin' Weight Watchers program that takes up about half my life every year if I want to maintain anything close to my regular appearance. Yep, I have enough vanity for that. It's okay, I never eat so well as when I'm following the program -- I just don't get the requisite amount of chocolate.
I have decided to resume an old tradition of mine -- to arise at dawn and take my Collected Poems by Dylan Thomas, and read the birthday poem out loud in some wild spot full of sunrise and nature. It used to be that I'd go up one of the mountain trails, and time it so that I was reading just as the sun broke over the horizon over my fair city and the coast. Then one year I was a little too early, and in the woods in the dark I was *so sure* that I could feel the spirits of the Indians from the old mission rushing past me (don't ask why I thought that; *I* don't know. You know how strange I am. And why should I fear native spirits, anyway?) So I freaked, and drove back down off the mountain and oddly enough ended up at the mission, the Queen of the Missions, and read the poem from the steps in front of the chapel, because there's a great view of the city and the ocean from there too. And a little old nun opened the chapel door and was very surprised to see me, it being just dawn and all, and asked, quite nicely, what I was doing there, and when my friend Cindy (who I had fetched from our communal household because yeah, I was that freaked) announced it was my birthday with a big grin on her face, the nun just smiled and wished me a happy birthday, and it was. Cindy, who brought me into that communal house and was (and is) Pooh to my Piglet, was the one who gave me the poem to begin with. I love her muchly.
Where was I? Oh yes, so I'll read the poem, and if I chicken out at driving up the mountain I'll just take it to the beach, and do my soul some good. And since I can't write hobbit fiction or anything like that, I thought I'd share the poem with y'all, in case you want to read it yourselves sometime on your birthday. But remember, it has to be dawn. It says so, in the poem. And just substitute your own year when it says "thirtieth year to heaven." Let the poem just roll over you.
It's my forty-ninth year to heaven, and it will be good. I should get some sleep, as I have an early date with a beach. Or a mountain to climb.
Poem in October, by 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 net 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 rainy autumn
And walked abroad in a 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 sun light
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 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 singingbirds.
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.
"O may my heart's truth still be sung on this high hill in a year's turning."
I love you all. *Smooch*
HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOLLY!
I hope your day is fabulous, wonderful, special, delightful, and as full of joy and light as you are yourself. May all your wishes come true, sweetie.
It's Molly's birthday now, and it's mine too. She is twenty-eleven, and I am... thirty-nineteen. *Sigh* Let's just call it 49, shall we? A number that gives me pause. I've never, ever had issues with age before this past year. I have always welcomed every new year, and a number is just a number for a' that. (Hee, a bit of Bobby Burns, right? Or is it Kipling? Can't remember. See? There goes the memory.) And I'm not truly upset, but somehow feeling like I'm approaching 50 seems... wrong. If anything, I've regressed so far this past year into retro-adolescence that it's not even funny. (Wait, that's a lie -- it's pretty fecking hilarious most of the time.) People have noticed, you know. People have been downright *appreciative* -- my own brother says I've "come back", and my best RL friend is just delighted with my company of late. My stepsister-in-law was thrilled to find a companion-in-lust as we compared notes on just exactly what mid-life hormones were wreaking on us. And I have lots of good examples in front of me: friends who have passed the 50-year milestone so gracefully as to make it seem just beautiful. Two of them are actively belly-dancing at the Moroccan restaurant we ate at tonight to celebrate my day. Gorgeous, they are, and still such wonderful dancers it's unbelievable. Heh, they work out at the gym every day too. So, really, the age is just another number and just another slight adjustment to cope with. And the midlife crisis, the retro-adolescent fun? Well, I owe a debt of gratitude to The Lord of the Rings (the movie) for starting it off, and huge, huge love and thanks to
daisy_gamgee for really kicking it into gear, first with THoU and her warm, caring email letters, and then bringing me into LJ, where I met everyone else. It was fun at the restaurant -- I had wine, got up and danced, ate good food in spite of the fact that I'm back on the frickin' Weight Watchers program that takes up about half my life every year if I want to maintain anything close to my regular appearance. Yep, I have enough vanity for that. It's okay, I never eat so well as when I'm following the program -- I just don't get the requisite amount of chocolate.
I have decided to resume an old tradition of mine -- to arise at dawn and take my Collected Poems by Dylan Thomas, and read the birthday poem out loud in some wild spot full of sunrise and nature. It used to be that I'd go up one of the mountain trails, and time it so that I was reading just as the sun broke over the horizon over my fair city and the coast. Then one year I was a little too early, and in the woods in the dark I was *so sure* that I could feel the spirits of the Indians from the old mission rushing past me (don't ask why I thought that; *I* don't know. You know how strange I am. And why should I fear native spirits, anyway?) So I freaked, and drove back down off the mountain and oddly enough ended up at the mission, the Queen of the Missions, and read the poem from the steps in front of the chapel, because there's a great view of the city and the ocean from there too. And a little old nun opened the chapel door and was very surprised to see me, it being just dawn and all, and asked, quite nicely, what I was doing there, and when my friend Cindy (who I had fetched from our communal household because yeah, I was that freaked) announced it was my birthday with a big grin on her face, the nun just smiled and wished me a happy birthday, and it was. Cindy, who brought me into that communal house and was (and is) Pooh to my Piglet, was the one who gave me the poem to begin with. I love her muchly.
Where was I? Oh yes, so I'll read the poem, and if I chicken out at driving up the mountain I'll just take it to the beach, and do my soul some good. And since I can't write hobbit fiction or anything like that, I thought I'd share the poem with y'all, in case you want to read it yourselves sometime on your birthday. But remember, it has to be dawn. It says so, in the poem. And just substitute your own year when it says "thirtieth year to heaven." Let the poem just roll over you.
It's my forty-ninth year to heaven, and it will be good. I should get some sleep, as I have an early date with a beach. Or a mountain to climb.
Poem in October, by 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 net 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 rainy autumn
And walked abroad in a 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 sun light
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 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 singingbirds.
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.
"O may my heart's truth still be sung on this high hill in a year's turning."
I love you all. *Smooch*
