water signs

Oh, how the waning hours of February glide into the early days of March each year.  I blinked and it became the 8th of March, just like that.  And I, just as abruptly as one adjusts to writing a new year on calendars and checks come January one, am suddenly describing myself by a new pair of numbers.  That's a three and a one.  I am in it now: full-fledged thirties.  And I feel it, and its good.

Last year I remember trying to get mentally ready for the transition from my late twenties to that foreboding number thirty, the first milestone birthday, checking in with myself to make sure I was in the right place, or at some crucial right juncture, or with a right path ahead to some apex, at least.   I thought I had done well and packed my mental-preparedness gear, but come that fateful day I awoke in a grumpus and spent most of the day there.  [Which is difficult to articulate because being a Leap Year Baby I don't actually have the benefit of a fateful day...at least not but one year in every four].  Yes, last year I spent the waking hours in a funky conundrum of ethereal questions like "where am I going?" and "what am I doing here?" and "how has all this time gone so fast?". And all this funk at the sea, no less.

But not this year.  This year I was very hesitant and anxious about the fateful unspecific birth-day.  And perhaps even more so because of the nature of not having a "day" to just sink into and get it over with.  My birthday instead tends to trail on for a week and meld into others, like my mother's and brother's, both less than a week down the line towards the Ides of March.  It is the tendency of water [signs] to flow, after all, and I am not opposed to the nature of my Pisces-ness.  It seems perfectly fitting to gather in a school and go on swimming into the next set of numbers together.

"fish, etc. be renewed",  Work of Art XI

 Already my mother's are a six and a zero- huge milestone! My brother's a two and an eight.  Along down the watery line of birthdays is my new dear friend Amy: two and five today, my old friend Ryan: three and one (just like me !), and both members of my step-family have already settled into theirs.

But I digress...

Yes this year my inadvertent week-long strand of birthday acknowledgment has been nothing short of perfect.  It began with the beloved snow day (you know the one), then an impromptu night out at a 'Pisces party' (not my own, thus even more glorious), and proceeded with a treat of beer stout floats (yummm), a gifted massage (ahhhh) and a dream therapy session ( I love these any day), then trickled down to a little stream that flowed through the weekend all the way to my mother's house for celebration in family company, and into today where the well filled with one final hoorah in a sea-green jade lounge- couldn't be more perfect.  And the sun was shining and it smelled like spring and we sat outside because we could.

This year my birthday fit to a 'T'.  I have grown into myself over the past year and I know what I am doing here, and how the time has passed just appropriately long or short depending on perspective, and that where I am going upwards ahead is right and good, as far as I can see.  Along this pearl string of birth-day(s) celebration I have commiserated, celebrated, cried, laughed, retreated, basked, discussed, pondered, and coddled a little epiphany.  On the twenty-eighth of February, my first non-birthday day, I began writing my essays for Art Therapy school.  And the link of events and people and days and weather patterns and travel and dreams has carried me like a river into the great warm pool of thirty one where I unwind with languor and pen in hand.  I am grateful for the water signs.