Cake and ashes

Yesterday I baked a cake and celebrated the day I was born. Tonight my pastor will put ashes on my forehead to remind me of my death. These moments when birth and death run up against each other sometimes feel like thin places, those moments when the veil ripples a little in the breeze and we catch a glimpse of something behind it all.

The reveal isn’t always so subtle, though. A few summers ago when I was breastfeeding my newborn at his uncle’s funeral, it felt more like a jagged crack. A famous poet once described eternity as “a great ring of pure and endless light, / All calm, as it was bright”[1] but at the time it was very dark, as if the world was breaking apart, a thin shell enclosing nothing at all.

I’m not feeling any particular existential angst this time—just an unsettled sense that this is not where I expected I would be at this age. The crack isn't a gaping chasm oozing darkness—it's an uneven split on the sidewalk that I trip over Every. Single. Time. I thought that by the time I turned 30 I would have a more established place in the world, which I would have of course built on my years of education and experience, a place that would include what my husband, tongue firmly in cheek, calls “an established daily dress code.” 

He’s not very sympathetic to me, as you maybe noticed. When I told him I felt like I was still in just as much a state of *becoming* (as opposed to *being*) at 30 as I was at 20, he remarked, “You know when that stops, right? About six months after you’re dead.” Thanks, love.

Though of course he's right. Growth will happen no matter where we are. And a crack might be a spot of damage and weakness, but it’s also a wonderful place to put down some roots and bloom in unexpected places. Here’s to another year of finding those thin places and gaps in the world, of becoming and blooming where I never imagined I could.

This sprouted in our front steps last summer, and I hope it comes back this year, too.

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[1] Henry Vaughan, “The World”