The Best Part of a Birthday Party
on how humans are hardwired for connection
My son, Stanley, turned six last month. My husband and I threw him a party at the Lindale Splash Pad, a water-play feature in our neighborhood public park. It was a typical little-kid birthday for our friend group: ubiquitous pizza, a veggie tray, fruit. Capri Suns for the kids; La Croix for the adults. Party favor bags filled with small plastic toys. Presents. A decorated cake with too much frosting. Exhausting and messy.
But when we returned home from the party, slightly sunburned, a bit wind-blown, our hair tangled from jet sprays of water, our bellies full of pizza and cake, we were happy and tired.
After the party, I asked Stanley, “What was the best part of your birthday party?”
“Camping.”
“What do you mean? Camping?”
“When Laurie and me took our chairs to the best campground site. On the hill.”
Instantly, I recalled the best photo I shot with my phone that day.
“Wait,” I tell him.
I scroll in my camera roll. Stanley, and his best friend, Laurie, sit in two folding camp chairs. They’re still soaking wet. The rash guards they wear to protect them from the sun show how wiry they are at 6 years old. They’re at the edge of the Splash Pad, where an Astro-turf covered cement knoll stands. They’ve situated their chairs side-by-side, throne-like on the top of this little hill, and they look out at the other children splashing in the water with kind benevolence. They both have paper plates of pizza perched on their laps. Stanley turns his head to Laurie to say something, and it’s clear that she’s delighted by what he says. Even though I can’t hear what they’re saying, it’s clear that we have two friends, deeply, truly engaged in a lively, fun conversation.
I hand Stanley my phone.
“That’s it!”
During the party, when I’d glanced at Stanley and Laurie, what compelled me to grab a snapshot was the human connection. I didn’t know the context or the content of their conversation, but I could see it was a special moment of friendship.
Humans are hardwired for connection. For community.
Marking milestones gives us the opportunities to gather, to show up for each other.
It takes effort (and sometimes a lot of refined sugar), but it’s something I don’t take for granted any more, not after a pandemic almost severed all my community ties for a year and a half, not after I’ve lived in 5 different states over the course of only 7 years, having to start making community connections over and over.
Communities—the groups of lovely and very cool people that I keep crossing paths with in Corpus Christi—are precious to me. I hope you are not too busy to tend to yours. (I almost didn’t have Stanley’s party because his birthday was the same day as my book’s publication day, and I didn’t think I could plan a book launch and a 6th birthday party in the same week. Luckily, I didn’t have to because Kent took over the birthday party planning.)
Have you thought about the communities you belong to? How do you define community?
I teach at a community college. I call my class sections, those rosters of names gathered to be together in a specific classroom at a set day and time for 16 weeks in a row, communities. I belong to a spiritual community, now formally as a member of church, where I celebrate the Eucharist on Sundays. I live as a community citizen in a municipality, where I volunteer and vote. I’m part of literary community of writers who encourage, teach, and share their writing. I am part of a spiritual journaling community, that meets only on Zoom, which started in July 2020, when my household was in complete lockdown.
We spent half a year working our way through the 24 chapters in Christina Baldwin’s Life’s Companion: Journal Writing as a Spiritual Practice, and then we found that our group was such an important community—one that exists solely on Zoom of all places!—that the six other women in the group and I just kept going. Now we’ve reflected and journaled through a total of seven books (including my highly recommended favorites: Wake Up Grateful by Kristi Nelson and Wild Women, Wild Voices by Rudy Reeves.)
One of our group practices is a form of sacred listening/reading, which I’ve recently learned has a fancy Latin name: florilegia, which means “a gathering of flowers.” As we share and discuss, one person volunteers to be the group’s scribe. She listens and writes down any sentence that strikes her as significant, which Vanessa Zoltan calls a “sparklet.”
I’d been practicing florilegia and recording sparklets for years now, and suddenly stumbled upon the names and traditions for this type of spiritual practice in Zoltan’s wonderful book, Praying with Jane Eyre: Reflections on Reading as a Sacred Practice.
When we keep a record of our collective sparklets, we treat each other’s words as scared. We are distilling the spiritual energy of the group. We are seeing our connections, that there is that of God in all of it!
At the end of our meetings, the scribe reads the list of sparklets. Then we discuss what resonated, what is speaking to our souls as a group, and how that might transform into an intention we’ll follow for the next week. Last week’s intention:
Discover comforting webs of connections.
Of course, this past week, I’ve seen connections everywhere. I’ve seen kind humans sharing, communing if you will, in community. I’m also noticing that reading, the power of words, the experiences I bring when I confront a text are an important form of spiritual connection for me.
Have you ever practiced a form of sacred reading? I’d love to hear about your experience.
What would happen if you noted sparklets from you favorite poetry collection, perhaps by Mary Oliver or Ross Gay, or the Psalms? What ways might you read and discover comforting webs of connections?
Writing Life News:
Tonight (July 20), I’m giving a reading and book signing at the Neyland Public Library at 6:30 pm. If you’re in Corpus Christi, I’d love to see you there!
