Birthdays

My relationship with birthdays has changed over the years. As a little girl it was my favorite time of the year - all eyes on me, mami would clean my room and make strawberry shortcake, papi would dress the house with pink garlands that spelled my name. Materialistic and a bit narcissistic by nature, birthdays fueled my two great loves: attention and stuff.

As i got older it was all about the magnitude of the gathering, the coolness and sexiness of the party being a representation of the self. Outfits would be planned all the way to the tiny ring on my fake-tanned, left foot, carbohydrates banned until further notice... friends and crushes would coalesce - uncontainable curiosity and excitment flowing.

I'm not sure when things took a turn, so i can only speak of what i feel today. i am very excited, yet it isn't the attention or the stuff driving my excitement. As i begin to climb 30, gratitude for what I have had, meets with the unfolding of a very significant decade. Rather than picking dresses and sending evites I feel like I'm preparing for a rite of passage of a sort; reincorporating the old, birthing something new. The idea of the Saturn Return seems very relevant and it is interesting that my mother and father, to some extent, are going through this simultaneously with me.

"Astrolgers define the Saturn Return as an astrological phenomenon that occurs at the ages of 27-30, 58-60, and finally from 86-88, coinciding with the time it takes the planet Saturn to make one orbit around the sun. It is believed that as Saturn "returns" to the degree in which it occupied at the time of birth -- approximately every 29.5 years -- a person crosses over a major threshold and into the next stage of life. With the first Saturn Return, a person leaves youth behind and enters adulthood. With the second Return, maturity. And the third and usually final Return, a person enters wise old age".

I understand that being present, in the now, is one way to eternal happiness, and I'm definitely contradictng myself by looking forward at what's to come. Yet I think that's what it's about, being in the grey with everything. I'm approaching the next portion of life at one with the grayness of ambivalence. Not here or there, in-between knowing and not-knowing, having and not having - in this space we can create.
Without a blueprint, and in the now, yet attentive of what's to come.