blissmorgan

My birthday was two days ago and it was... really surprisingly good. I mean, as an actual day goes, it was kind of bog standard: went to work, went grocery shopping, came home, had dinner, hung out with my family, went to bed. But I approached it differently than I have in years past. Not only did I fail to plan myself a party, but I also felt no sense of loss or resentment about the lack of party. Yes, I had to buy my own cake else there would have not been one, but that meant that not only did I get a cake but I got one that I really liked (yellow cake with blue icing and white snowflakes on top). I got lots of FB messages, but didn't feel obligated to reply to every single one. All in all it ended up being a good day.

This all would have been incredibly stressful to me even as recently as last year. I've been going through a lot of change, internally; SALM talked with me last night about how he's been trying to give me a lot of room and space because I "seem to be doing a lot of processing" and reader, he's not wrong. I'm not sure how much of that processing is necessarily conscious and deliberate, but it does seem to be happening.

Sunday he drove all the way to Harvard Square and came home with a box of the Robert Burns Scotch Whiskey collection of chocolates form L.A. Burdick.  It is a special assortment of scotch-blended chocolates in honor of the 260th anniversary of Burns' birth, which is going to be on the 25th. Writing of it just now, I've gone to look at some of his poems. It's been a long time since I read any Burns, and I forgot how prone he is go give me a giggle - he's like the Scottish Twitter of his day!

I got me a gift for my birthday as well. There is a jewelry artist whose work I quite enjoy, Kythryne Aisling, who runs Wyrding Studios. I am in a group on the book of faces for fans of her work. There she did a project on NYE of having folk choose a dollar amount to spend, a color, a word, a type of jewelry piece, and a guideword, and she would create them over the course of the passage of the old year into the new that night - At The Turning Of The Year. I live close enough to her that mine came the day after I paid for it, and I was able to wear it on my birthday:

At no point did I actually tell her that it was a birthday present for myself, so the fact that she made my birthstone the centerpoint of my new shawl pin is an unexpected delight.

My birthday also brought with it the perfectly timed arrival of a piece of art. It was drawn for me by a dear artist friend, and I am not going to share it here because apparently they sometimes get hounded for Free Artz and I don't want anyone to end up angry or butthurt that I got something and they didn't, for whatever reason. I am going to share that it gives me a giggle, and this weekend is going to include hitting the shops to get another frame so I can put it up on my Art Wall in the bedroom.

I feel like I had more I wanted to say but spent out all my time on birthday recountings. I think I was going to ruminate on how this birthday went so quietly well because I really am living that guideword, "release", and started doing so even before I chose it. I suppose that instead of leaving this sitting open while I try to think of what more I meant to say, I had better just release it.

Hello, Blisstopia.<3