Slept in, my room is drifting with the smell of my favourite incense, and a plate that held my decadent breakfast lies empty in front of me. Life is good, life is always good, but today is better and the start of a better period. Today is the day that the Cosmos became manifest, my birthday.
Though this year is a bit more subdued I generally treat my birthday as a holy day. Why shouldn’t I? Why shouldn’t we? We celebrate the birthdays of our gods, saints, and religious figures as holy days, but we’re deserving of it to. Most mystic traditions agree whatever Ultimate is out there, we are that Ultimate: distilled, miniaturized, shattered, lost, whatever. It’s us. Tat tvam asi.
Embrace your birthday, not just as a day of gifts, cake, and checking the mirror for more grey (note to self: redye my hair), but a day of celebration, contemplation. Cosmos became manifest on your birthday; billions of random particles came together to make you (they’re all gone now and other particles have taken your place, but it was a beginning); billions of unlikely circumstances came together to make you (the right sperm with the right egg, your parents meeting, your parents surviving long enough to procreate in a chain that repeats going back billions of years); spirit took up flesh, the divine descended into the human. When viewed in that way we are so exceedingly unlikely we might as well be impossible, but we’re here, all the factors were perfect, and we’re here. Celebrate! Sorry to go Dr. Jonathan Osterman on my blog (I’m really not), but we are all such impossible creatures, yet we forget, we overlook the wonder that is our very existence. Embrace it.
I love the placement of my birthday. The Sun is Conjunct the Galactic Centre, which has great meaning to me, and it’s just days before the Solstice and two weeks exactly before New Years. If you’ve read this blog for a year this is a bit of a rehash. I treat the two weeks between my birthday and New Years as a kind of twilight period. Really my birthday is when a year begins and ends, but New Years is so close too. So in these two weeks I transition from year to year. For two weeks my magickal/spiritual practice becomes optional. Why? It lets me see what I still want to do, what is still serving me, and gives me time to plan a new routine if needed. For these two weeks I re-evaluate my goals, check at my successes and failures to meet goals over the year, figure out what went wrong and right and where to go from here. Forwards, not backwards, upwards, not forwards. I rewrite the letters that will be released on my death, probably my oldest birthday tradition, stemming back to when we weren’t sure I’d survive to do the adult thing.
Also as it is the twilight of the year I find it’s a brilliant time to do magick to shape the following year. There is something about transition points, dusk and twilight, equinoxes, it is as if the reality of the before period is weakening, but the reality of what is yet to come isn’t in place yet and in that divide, that crack, there lies magick. So in this period morphing into the New Year, I discard the old: physically, mentally, magickally; I evaluate and divine my path, and I seize this halflight of the year and begin to make my next year.
Not everyone is lucky enough to share my birthday (Mega Man, Bart Simpson, and Eugene Levy do) but it’s not needed, it’s convenient. For most people that gap between Christmas and New Years seems to occupy this same nebulous place, it’s not quite this year, but it’s not next year yet.
Evaluate your year, mundanely/intellectually and magickally/intuitively, what worked and what didn’t? Plan your next year in the same manner: think, intuit, research, and divine. Create your next year, seize this in-between place and magick your way to your future. And celebrate my birthday, it couldn’t hurt.
Birthdays, Miracles, and the Year Ahead.
