Between Roots and Clouds: Birthday Reflections

There is a peculiar clarity that arrives with birthdays, like sunlight filtering through oxidated leaves. We find ourselves standing at the intersection of what was and what might be, suddenly aware of our solitude and connections.

Perhaps it’s the surprise of it—the professional congratulations outnumber the friends who remembered despite talking less in recent years than ever before.

Yet the birthday reveals the beautiful mess of human connection: old and eternal lovers, restaurant owners singing to you, mothers and aunts appearing with unexpected warmth, and people selling cakes and bralettes suddenly part of your celebration. These aren’t abstract connections but flesh-and-blood people from different eras and ways, their voices a chaotic chorus that somehow makes perfect sense on this one day of the year. Also, the void of voices forms part of the experience.

We build lives in contradiction. Some of us remain solid in the clouds, untethered and free while ensuring our children have the roots we never prioritized. We accept the cost of being loved from a distance—a love that is both expensive and precious. We pay this price willingly, knowing that to be witnessed, even imperfectly, is to exist more fully.

The birthday becomes a moment of accounting—not of years passed but of connections maintained and lost. We count the hands that reach us and notice the spaces between fingers. We measure the distance between the solitude we thought we wanted and the surprising ache of its reality.

Ultimately, we pay the price of being loved – an actual cost, not metaphorical. It’s in the decisions made over two decades, choosing to give children more roots than we have while remaining more comfortable in the clouds. It’s in the contrast between oxidated leaves on old trees and being surrounded by exquisite orchids – not poetic imagery but actual stations in life, places we’ve inhabited, with all their earthy, messy reality. We preach to death, who remains deaf to the living, so we keep flying high, maintaining our significance in the face of it all.

This is the birthday paradox: to simultaneously recognize our fundamental aloneness and the beautiful web of human connection that holds us anyway.

May Harmony find you,

Irena Phaedra