Wings at 60

The package was waiting on my desk, having travelled all the way from Germany, and looking quiet mysterious. I am not gentle when it comes to opening a parcel or package, so it was ripped open quickly. Inside was a wonderful book of poetry, Evidence, by Mary Oliver. Along with the book was a poem from the book that had been framed:

Halleluiah

Everyone should be born into this world happy
     and loving everything.
But in truth it rarely works that way.
For myself, I have spent my life clamoring toward it.
Halleluiah, anyway, I'm not where I started!

And have you too been trudging like that, sometimes
     almost forgetting how wonderous the world is and
          how miraculously kind some people can be?
And have you too decided that probably nothing important
     is ever easy?
Not, say, for the first sixty years.

Halleluiah, I'm sixty now, and even a little more,
and some days I feel I have wings.

Mary Oliver

This book, and this poem, meant so much to me. The book sits beside my desk and has become my 'when I need to ponder' book. She write evocatively with images that somehow bring me to a place where thinking is possible.

So it's my birthday.

I'm sixty.

And some days I feel I have wings.