A Birthday Reflection

I’ll be celebrating a significant birthday this month.  It seems to be giving me pause for many reasons.  I would love to write about it but the words just don’t seem to reflect how I’m feeling. Maybe I’ll write about it at a later date.  At times like this, I reach for the work of Anne Morrow Lindbergh.  I found this poem that seems to articulate how I feel.

Bare Tree
Already I have shed the leaves of youth,
stripped by the wind of time down to the truth
of winter branches. Linear and alone
I stand, a lens for lives beyond my own,
a frame through which another’s fire may glow,
a harp on which another’s passion, blow.

The pattern of my boughs, an open chart
spread on the sky, to others may impart
its leafless mysteries that I once prized,
before bare roots and branches equalized,
tendrils that tap the rain or twigs the sun
are all the same, shadow and substance one.
Now that my vulnerable leaves are cast aside,
there’s nothing left to shield, nothing to hide.

Blow through me, Life, pared down at last to bone,
so fragile and so fearless have I grown!

Anne Morrow Lindbergh (www.poemhunter.com)

Yes, “so fragile and so fearless have I grown” is a double edged sword that is increasingly a burden too heavy, sums it up for me today.

Until next time

As always

a dawn bird