Birthmonth

Somehow, it was March again.

That ephemeral month that marks the border of spring in the northern hemisphere, when the ever earlier sunrise begins to warm and thaw the blanket of winter from the land. How it whips up the winds to help scour the dead season’s bones from the earth and make ready the nesting grounds of the creatures who love the sun. Even we, we who have kept our hearts shrouded during those dim and cold months so that we might better insulate ourselves through the long nights, now throw open the shutters and greet the day in blinking wonder. How good it is to smell the green in the air once more, to have banished the dry emptiness of the chill mornings! To store the heavy duvets for another nine months, replace the thick wools with lighter cottons, to once more mothball the caps and scarves so that the full glory of the coming season might penetrate our crowns and heat our necks of its own accord.

I was born in the spring, a mere eleven days after the official vernal point (or autumnal, though I have never been south of the equator) when the day is as long as the night. It was not by design; My parents accidentally conceived me during a hot night of summer passion in a roadside motel somewhere in California. Knowing the particulars of my conception has never bothered me, less so as they were related to me in my late adolescence, whereby then I had come to understand that more than a few of us human beings were unplanned, and not all matrimonial or parental unions were preordained nor even born from love. There are so many little gateways of fate that a life must pass through in order to flourish, or at least reach the point of self-awareness, that none of us can take anything for granted; nor must we be surprised by any twists or turns of fate that life presents us. Meditating on such things for overlong can be a surefire ticket to madness.

So, it is when spring comes around I become aware of my passage through time. Sometimes I ponder what it would feel like to celebrate this change of season in Australia, or Argentina, or South Africa. Would I still find myself possessed of the same shifting energies that signal both renewal and advancing age? To be moving forward into maturity, edging ever closer to that hard limit that all of us face, the limit of our breaths and heartbeats, the cliff that surrounds the horizon of our conscious thoughts, while all around us nature moves into her autumnal evening, the drawing of the shades and preparations for winter. Would such a time convey a greater sense of depression, or impart a keener awareness of the preciousness of this short life? It is an experience I will have to arrange before the sand runs out of my hourglass.

2015.03.01 – 2023.09.25

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