This week I celebrated my birthday. Ever since I fully entered the stream and saw this reality around me dissolve, I stopped caring about my birthday in a way. As a younger person, I used to get anxiety about people remembering my birthday or not, fearful that I would feel lonely around that time. As an adoptee it used to be hard growing up away from my family, always spending my birthday away from them. As a young adult, I would feel offended if my boyfriends or girlfriends didn’t remember my birthday or if they didn’t get me a gift. Now those anxieties have melted away and I laugh at myself. This lifetime I was born as Trinilyn and took on my mother’s name Trinidad so that the world would speak her name. I “made a name” for myself in the art world and made my mother so proud that she still cries every time that she talks about me to other people. With this joy I laugh at myself, too. The anxieties and joys are the same.
In another life I will be born again, a new person with a new birthday. The anxieties and joys will be similar. They are all illusions of the material world meant to shape us, grow us. When we grow a lot we then see that we are not “we” at all. And then we laugh at ourselves again. We are quite literally one. Our perceived loneliness, fears, sorrows here on Earth are miniature, reflected versions of what the Universe herself felt before she made the most ancient emanations of herself, the deities and us. Our joys are miniature versions of her profound, eternal joy because she makes Life, is Life itself. She is the original author, the artist of our consciousness and D.N.A., she is the womb, the aether, movement and change. When we make something that brings joy to others, when we give generously, she says, “See, how I create?”
On my birthday, I paid homage to the Buddha for transmitting the Dharma to his students and to those in the world who, centuries later, would listen for themselves.
Then, I paid my yearly voluntary land tax to the local indigenous tribe whose land I occupy. Although I am and adoptee and immigrant, I am also a settler because I never had my local tribe’s permission to live here. They are a marginalized people without federal recognition or financial support. Paying the land tax allows them to save money and over time buy back land that was stolen from them. This preserves their food practices and therefore their well-being.
I then made contributions (donations and volunteer work) to the Bhutan Nuns Foundation, the Songdhammakalyani Monastery in Thailand, the Tibetan Nuns Project in Northern India, and Dhammadharini Monastery and East Bay Meditation Center in California. Supporting women in Buddhist and Tantric communities is critical if Buddhists wish to keep the true diversity of the Dharma alive.
I made offerings to the sun, for she gifts to us warmth, inspiration, the Dharma itself. I watered the fragrant herbs and flowers in my summer garden. I thought of my friends behind bars, my friends unable to be outside with me because they stood up to injustice. I ate food with my parents, partner, and son in our backyard. My son fed barley to the pair of mourning doves who live on the side of our house and said prayers for my protection. I hope in my next life I will get glimpses of this life and remember the bittersweet moments of fleeting joy.