Birthday, 2025

Hello, Everyone!

A warm welcome to new subscribers, and much love to continuing readers.

This is my birthday week, and one of my most cherished gifts is to have you to write to. I don’t know if there are happier people on earth than creative people whose creativity is supported. Seriously! So thank you for being here—you are deeply loved.

Also! I am so excited to be on

Jane Morgan

and

Sarah Rathke

’s podcast Medium Curious. These women are awesome! We had a ball. Have a listen if you want to hear three women cracking up about being alive and talking to unseen things.

I wrote some of this post last year, but it’s all still true, so I’m reposting with a few updates.

Hello birthday!

I am 57. Fifty-seven! Here is what that feels like to me. It is beautiful outside. There are snowdrops all over the backyard and I cannot believe my luck at being alive in a body—that I get to walk beneath a moonlit sky in my backyard full of trees listening to a creek that rushes through town. I cannot believe the amount of love I’ve experienced in this lifetime and that there is potential for even more, that my feet can still dance, my hands still write, my eyes can see and my heart feel so much. That my ears can delight in music. I am so happy I get to write to you, and that you are here too, loving so many of the same things I do. I am alive on planet earth and the sun is streaming through an old window and the cat is stretched out on the floor and a chickadee sits on the birdfeeder saying, “Why is this empty?”

Yesterday I wrote a letter to my soul. Do you ever do that? I like to do this each year, just to see what she might have to say.

I’m guessing she knows how this all works out.

I’m guessing she’s lived and died many times, and has wisdom I’ve forgotten.

So I asked her, What do you want me to know for 2025?

She said, “Woman, if there’s one thing I have to tell you this year it’s FLY towards your enthusiasm. Don’t dim it! Don’t try to calm it down! Don’t walk or saunter. Run towards it like the f-ing wind!

If something excites you, do it! Don’t hold back laughter. Use as many exclamation points as you like!!!!

Love your sisters! Fill your home even more with more little altars and sacred spaces where you can say hello to the spirits and ancestors and all the things that sing to your heart.

When you meet people, look at their eyes. Say thank you to that soul crossing your path. Maybe in another life you were lovers. Maybe you fought like demons! But now here you are, sitting across from each other on the subway. Amazing! This is how quickly lifetimes pass and how long their sparks endure.

You love taking care of your father, helping people with personal problems and sitting with friends making things. You love singing by the sea.

Don’t you love how this life is one string of small miracles after another? How all emotions or teachers, how joy is everywhere and you don’t have to do what everyone else says? How this life goes on forever and into the stars who have their own dreams, and sometimes gaze down at this sweet planet and say, Look that beautiful place with all of that water! Let’s make a wish.

If we make a wish on that shining blue jewel, surely, it will come true.

love, your soul.”

My birthday wish is that all beings find peace, that all beings be happy, and that all beings be free of suffering.

And that you enjoy more enthusiasm and delight this year than you ever thought possible.

* * *

PS: Here are some birthday song alternatives to “Happy Birthday,” which to me has always sounded like a funeral dirge.

This one starts with Happy Birthday, but then bursts into something fantastic:

My parents met and lived in Mexico when they were first married. I remember my father getting up in the morning of my mother’s birthday playing this song for her. (We lived in upstate New York by then.) It fills my heart every time I hear it.

One last thing:

as many of you know, my father has Alzheimer’s. One of the things we are doing together to help nourish his brain and our connection is working on a book he wrote before he got diagnosed with the disease. It’s about the adventures he had chasing steam engines in Mexico in the late 1950s and early 60s. Dad was an amazing photographer, and his stories are beautiful.

If you know anyone who loves trains, steam engines, or is interested in this part of Mexican history, please feel free to share this substack with them.

https://frankbarryrailphotography.substack.com/

Thank you again! You are the best!

Happy Birthday!