Today I’m 55

Today I turn 55 and the storm is brewing outside. The wild flowers sway in the afternoon wind. Today I'm 55. Today I'm open to life and life is open to me.

My body temple serves me well. I experience pleasure by choice in hundreds of tiny and miraculous ways all throughout my days.

I grieve the suffering also by choice in solidarity with the world. I weave my colorful threads in the great basket unfolding and reweaving itself. I have lived my purpose. I am self-expressed and I love it. I love it. While there is always more to do and be and learn, I am complete today.

The story being told is my own legend. Self lives here in me and we are good. My cooling sack of stars is lit up by a love that feels ancient and intact.

A woman stands outside drumming, singing in an ancient tongue as I begin this message to you. I have no children of my own living.

I have few elders of my own living. Family as I knew it feels like something in the past, we do not gather the way that we used to. I love my family and yet find myself wondering about the next version of chosen family in the day-to-day life. I am sovereign and at times feel very alone in what I am carrying as a soul. I know you know what I'm talking about.

Perhaps my biggest surprise is my intentional community. The pure joy of this lifetime is this big, big love. Intentional community. Intentional creativity. Many muses in many lands with many hands.

Today, all of my marriage bonds are complete this lifetime. I am complete in and of myself. As I lay down the burden of my lineage, of my grandmother's grandmother's grandmother's called: compromise to survive. The home, the elusive home I've always sought, must now become my own living heart.

This is the practice, and the rest is the great adventure. At least that's what Mama said. So we shall see what mother life reveals in me now. I offer my services into the great weave of creation. The mountains have become my sisters, and the rivers have become my brothers.

And the plants and the animals, my cousins and the genderless trees, they are my parents now. I feel a kind of orphaning. It's not the same kind as many orphans, but there's something stirring. So I lean into the trees.

Yes, I am she. She. But beyond the need for definition lies this strange freedom.

May the poetry of life's longing make of me a pen of reverence. May the painting of the world's beauty make of me a brush of radiance. May the ceremony of the ancestors sing through me now and now and now. I used to say to the divine, use me. Now I say to the divine, show me.

Make the path clear and may there be really good coffee with honey and cinnamon and cream and morning sun always in my cup. There's a feeling I have of almost having transcended sovereignty and entered into a unity with the natural world. Not so much a dissolving, but an integrating.

Because becoming one with wildflowers in the desert after the rain is such a good idea. Many of the names I have called myself were given to me by others and fathers and also men who did not provide the nourishment this wildflower needed. Thank you, Grandmother Eden, for the name McCloud.

She chose it for herself as an elder, And me and my loved ones, we share it like breaking bread. I have swallowed a new secret name. I have swallowed a new secret name. A true name which can only be given by one's self after a long and dangerous journey in the inner landscape of human being.

You know, this all sounds really dramatic. And it is. But it's also very quiet. I would whisper it if I could. This message is signed in the white cosmos of the Santa Fe desert that appear overnight after the rain.

I am here. I'm with a group of over 25 women, but I'm not telling anyone here it's my birthday. But I've told you. Glory be in this fragile strength of becoming. An elder in training is reborn.

Shiloh Sophia