Weekly Wide-Awake: On Birthdays, Pilgrimages, and Fairy Tales

[The Stage is on Fire] is a page-turner in which, much like life, there are no easy answers and yet each step of the journey yields insight and hope. This work of heart must not be missed!

Melanie Faith

Creative Writing Teacher, Essayist & Poet.

Katie Steedly’s first-person piece [The Unspeakable Gift] is a riveting retelling of her participation in a National Institutes of Health study that aided her quest to come to grips with her life of living with a rare genetic disorder. Her writing is superb.

The Society of Professional Journalists

In recognition of receiving the Dateline Award for the Washingtonian Magazine essay, The Unspeakable Gift.

I thank you … It is the authenticity of your “class notes”; and it is the delicacy and skill with which you present the nuances of classroom life and the actuality of your students’ and fellow teachers’ lives.

Maxine Greene

Philosopher and Education Scholar

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Weekly Wide-Awake: On Birthdays, Pilgrimages, and Fairy Tales

The final word is love.
Dorothy Day

Birthdays mean a lot to me. They always have. Birthdays are sacred in the way that birth is sacred. Birthdays are sacred in the way that celebration is sacred. Birthdays are sacred in the way memories are sacred. Birthdays are sacred in the way being seen — really being seen — is sacred. Birthdays are sacred in the way seeds and a chrysalis and skin are sacred. Birthdays are sacred in the way life itself is sacred.

I am thinking about birthdays as signposts on life’s pilgrimage toward even more love. If a pilgrimage is a journey toward a sacred place, or the journey of a scared calling, then love is the destination, and connection is the sacred calling. Through this lens, birthdays invite us to sit with our 7-year-old self that had a birthday party at Farrell’s Ice Cream. They invite us to remember manicotti dinners at Lentini’s. They invite us to reflect on when were were old enough to feel the joy surrounding celebrating another’s birthday. They invite us to remember the birthdays of loved ones who have passed.

If you don’t connect with birthdays — or birthdays conjure thoughts of sadness, disappointment, and pain — think about a time of deep, full-on, love instead. Hold that thought close, hug it with every ounce of understanding, compassion, and grace you can muster. Allow that to flow through you and become a birthday, of sorts. There is healing there. That can happen on any day at any time.

Some day you will be old enough

Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairytales again — CS Lewis

I have always read fairytales.

I have gone into the woods. I have confronted my giants in the sky. I have tried on glass slipper, after glass slipper, after glass slipper of jobs, cities, and relationships seeking connection, meaning, and love. I have sought happily ever after as purpose, mission, and heart.

Fiftieth Birthday Eve

The figure alone is enough to keep me wide awake,/ the five with its little station master’s belly/ and cap with the flat visor, followed by the zero,/ oval of looking glass, porthole on a ghost ship,/ an opening you stick your arm into and feel nothing. — From Billy Collins’ Fiftieth Birthday Eve

I am now several years beyond my 50th birthday. “Zero birthdays” have always held special significance. I have had a “Before I am [insert a zero year] birthday list” since I was 15 and diagnosed with Turner syndrome and my future became much less absolute, promised, and infinite. My lists have always answered the question, “If I only have this brief amount of time, what do I want to do with it?” My lists thus far have included finishing a marathon (before 30) and self-publishing a book (before 40) and buying my first home (which I accomplished during my 51st year, but I still count it). I have done all that. My marathon time was not great, but I finished. My book was not a New York Times Bestseller, but it can be ordered on Amazon today. My house is everything I asked for.

Experience

Pilgrimage: 1. a journey of a pilgrim especially one to a shrine or a sacred place; 2 : the course of life on earth

A few years ago, I bought Paul Elie’s The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage, mainly because I have been troubled by pilgrimages – what makes them special or different from your average trip, and the historical relationship between pilgrimage and mission – for a long time. I like the concept of a pilgrimage, and I thought this book might be food for thought. The profile of Dorothy Day, who I have wanted to know more about since Catholic high school drew me in, too. She speaks to my rebellious, social justice-centered spiritual path. The book also profiles Thomas Merton, Flannery O’Connor, and Walker Percy.

Turn Around

Where are you going my little one, little one/ Where are you going my baby my own/ Turn around and you’re two/ Turn around and you’re four/ Turn around and you’re a young girl/ Going out of the door — Nanci Griffith

“The days are long, but the years are short.” Especially looking at pictures of children on first days and last days of school, my calendar with pages quickly turned, anniversaries and birthdays that mark time in a way my body understands but my mind denies, I live long days and short years. Wrapped in long days and short years are Easters, Christmases, finisher medals, open doors, big mistakes, graduations, moving boxes, love affairs, scraped knees, births, and deaths.