April 11

My thirtieth birthday. Snow driving down all morning, an Alaskan idyll. A pair of pheasants crossing the meadow, a fresh track of moose prints across the frozen gravel. Awakened in earnest at seven sharp, alarms of messages & well-wishes already flooding in, making it damn near impossible for me to feel somehow sorry for myself today. I hauled myself here in the first, & now I look about my environs, & with each renewed glance they strike me ever more capaciously beautiful. Here, then, a choice, a walk along a razor’s edge, between letting some figured loneliness call out a pattern for the day or assuming full & complete accountability for my time. I will choose a celebration. I will choose the snow-heavy boughs of spruce, the icy wave-arms along the bay, the sleepy drone of the pickups along the Sterling Highway, the air—even in the interstices of falling flakes—redolent of spring. That I am alive to see it, resolved to be here, buoyed by such rich supports. Let me celebrate it, then, this turning, not by taking account of all that I have done & failed to do, but by embracing precisely what it is I am doing. No palimpsest in the present. & all of it mixed up together—a simple beauty in grief just as in mirth, in tears just as in laughter. It is the recognition of being in the world that I choose to cherish, the wonderment of it, that we are constellated always by readymade tableaus of life’s multifarious bounty. Truly, to look upon the most infinitesimal of minutiae is to encounter the heart laid bare, its gratitudes, its capacities, its self-same reflection. The frayed end of the two by four lining the stairs into the cabin, gnawed back by a gumming husky some years past. The ventricle. The barely perceptible shiver of the willow. The aorta. How I feel my way along, forging through a thicket under a slivered crescent of darkling moon.

But enough of the melodrama already. Happy my birthday, as my brother always says.