Midnight

It's midnight, the first minute of my 34th birthday.  

I sit on the front porch, the orange glow of streetlights and the gray glow of my computer screen my lights.  

I hear the creak, crick, creak, crick of my neighbor's swing and think how my kids would love to be on their schedule.  And I hear cicadas, trilling their layered rhythms.  

 

Today is the first day of my 35th year.  That sounds significant, and old.  I hope this year brings a settledness in my soul.  I still feel like a child much of the time, like my childhood hurts and fears and longings are constantly bubbling to the surface in my snips and snaps and unsettledness.  I hope that this midpoint of my life brings some wearing in...cushions that are not too hard and not too soft, but worn and shaped and contoured just right.  

I wonder if I will still feel like a child when I'm 40, 50, 65.  I came across some old journals last week and was disturbed to see fears, complaints, and conflicts scrawled in my 22 year-old handwriting that I could have just as easily written last week.  Clearly I am in a spiral with these things, but am I heading down, or up?  Am I a tornado, bent towards the ground, destruction, dust?  Or am I a vapor rising from a hot mug, reaching up, cooling, gaining perspective?  

Maybe that answer will come this year, or maybe not until I'm 70.  

I'll spiral on anyway, trusting that I'm held together by Someone who knows who I am, where I'm headed.