A Birthday Blessing (For Me, And Maybe For You)

I turned fifty this month and I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up.

I genuinely thought I’d have it more figured out by now. A fully baked life plan. A signature style I could describe in one sentence. Instead I’m still building moodboards of what I want my wardrobe to evolve into... and then wondering if it matches my actual life or some fantasy version I’ve invented in my head. I’m still looking at places I might want to live someday, from Puglia to Ojai, like I’m twenty-eight and anything is possible. I’m still experimenting with what “my style” means in painting. I’ve recently learned I love to bake sourdough but not cakes. I love to cook but hate the weekly grind of figuring out dinner.

Fifty, it turns out, is not the arrival. It’s just a more interesting version of the experiment.

And honestly? I think that’s the surprise I most want to share. Because somewhere between the moodboards and the sourdough I realized that growing older isn’t about getting more serious. It’s about getting more porous. More willing to not know. More willing to let the world back in.

Which brings me back to the grass.

I used to have full conversations with everything around me as a kid. The grass. Chairs. Patches of sunlight on the floor. Thank you for being warm. Thank you for holding me. You’re so beautiful. And then somewhere between twelve and thirty I stopped, because apparently that’s what growing up requires. You learn to walk past beautiful things without telling them so.

Here’s what surprises me about fifty: I’m doing it again.

Michael Pollan wrote about how plants communicate, respond, remember... that the line between sentient and not-sentient is blurrier than we think. I read that and felt something relax in me. See? Everything is alive. Everything is worth thanking. I didn’t get more serious as I got older so much as I remembered how to play.

So this year, instead of wisdom, I’m offering blessings. Small ones. The kind I’d whisper to the grass. They’re for me, yes... but mostly they’re for you.

There's a meditation by Sarah Blondin I return to again and again... a blessing for the body, the mind, the spirit. In that spirit, here are mine. For my birthday. For you.

A blessing for the body.

Mine is stronger at fifty than it was at forty, which I did not see coming and am genuinely delighted by. I offer this not to brag but because I want you to know: the body is not always in decline. Sometimes it’s just waiting for you to pay attention to it differently. Bless this complicated, opinionated, occasionally creaky thing that carries us through the world. Whatever yours has navigated to get you here... bless it. It knows more than we give it credit for.

A blessing for your people.

Mine is a big Greek family, which means everyone is always in my business. I say this with my whole heart. There are phone calls and opinions and group chats and nobody is keeping score because everyone is too busy cheering. We swap wisdom and bad jokes in equal measure. We show up. That’s the whole thing, really... we just show up for each other, loudly, in the most Greek way possible.

And then there are the friends. Still forming, still growing, morphing, strengthening... this surprised me too, that relationships at fifty aren't fixed things but living ones. Bless the friends who have been there long enough to know your worst years and love you anyway. Bless the new ones who arrived recently, unexpectedly, exactly right. Bless the ones you're still becoming close to, the friendship still in early light.

If your people show up for you like that... bless them today, specifically, by name, in your head right now. And if you’re still finding your people... they’re coming. Bless that too.

A blessing for the ordinary drives.

I drive my daughter everywhere. I hate driving. I love driving her. There is something about being side by side in a car... not face to face, just together, moving... that loosens things. She talks differently in the car. So do I. Whatever your version of this is... the walk, the errand, the standing in the kitchen while someone else cooks... bless it. The side-by-side moments are where so much of the real stuff happens.

A blessing for the word no.

I can say it now. It took fifty years. Bless the no that protects the yes. Bless the no that arrives calmly, without the four-paragraph apology that used to follow it. If you’re still working on yours, it’s coming. And when it does, it will feel like setting something heavy down.

A blessing for the creative life.

For the painting that didn’t work and the one that did and the hour in the studio when you couldn’t tell which was which. For whatever light is doing something extraordinary in your city right now that you keep meaning to stop and look at. For the fact that we get to be people who make things... who look for beauty on purpose, who turn toward color instead of away from it. That is not nothing. On most days it is everything. Bless the making. Bless the looking. Bless the impulse that says not yet, keep going.

I share these blessings not because my life is extraordinary, but because it isn’t. This is a normal Wednesday. The dishes are in the sink. I have seventeen unread texts distracting me from painting. And still... there is so much beauty here. So much light. So much quiet magic hiding in plain sight, in the grass and the driving and the people who show up and the word no and the painting that finally did what you asked it to.

Even when the world feels heavy, and these days it feels very heavy, the beauty doesn’t actually leave. It just waits. It waits for us to remember to look.

So on my birthday week I want to say this plainly: to everyone reading, you are the beauty and the light and the magic. Not metaphorically. Actually. You are why I write these letters, why I make the work, why any of this feels worth doing.

Thank you for being here. I’m so grateful for you.

Now go say something kind to the grass.