Celebration countdown day 9: a love note

As you know, I've been counting down to my birthday with things I love, in the hopes that it might inspire us all to love the world more. I've missed a few days, but that's okay.

Well, tomorrow is my birthday. Over the last few days I've covered:

• a poem about why we should celebrate
• time
• hammer horror films
• sunset
• fairy tales
• the smell of autumn
• another poem, this one about a way of moving through the world
• adagio for strings

Really, these are all love notes to being alive. 

There are so many other things I could list. Dim sum, The Beatles, massage, dancing even when you suck at it, storytelling, eavesdropping, apples, the ocean, the feel and sound and smell of rain, the crunch of snow, so many people, laughing until my stomach hurts and and and...

The world is vast and possible. Our lives are what we make of them.

Love the world. Love yourself. Thrive as best you can. And happy birthday to us all, because really, every day is our birthday, a new day of life in this world.

The Summer Day
Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

(c)2012 Laura S. Packer