The Open Matt Project

Embracing 33

Thursday I turn 33. Looking back on birthdays past, I can't help but feel underwhelmed by the lack of anything underscoring this one. No great heartaches to put behind me, no massive employment upheaval, no financial windfalls or disasters driving me to punctuate my next year. Aside from a name-change, "Tre-Tre", which I've already insisted on from all my friends, it seems my birthday has been infiltrated by an insidious mundanity. Some echo from a past Matt wants me to name this getting older, but if you ask me I'd have to say it isn't that - or rather, it's more than that.

Somewhere between the apocalyptic assault on my heart at the beginning of this year and the silent murder of my brain a few months ago, what walked away and types here now is something not new but more me than ever. By trusting on pure faith and enduring betrayal after betrayal, I was weathered into a new shape. By having my identity and inner voice dissolved and silenced, what remained was only strong enough to remain. It seems I am both made and creating.

For months there has been an urge to write about truth. Years ago I found my voice, but only recently have I discovered my ears and it is listening and then listening that has brought to my attention a faint harmonic, a vibration and tone that is unmistakable for its familiarity. That signal leads to truth and it is in everything heard.

Without inexhaustible trust and the inevitable betrayal the scent of such summons, there can never be a sense of the harmony between them. Lacking a indomitable personality and the terrible pride that it spawns, the depth and weight and value of humility is beyond reach. It is precisely this primal striving and submission that both creates and allows creation, and from which truth derives.

Possessed of such a view, how could I be anything but looking forward to Thursday?

Happy Birthday to me.