It’s a humbling thing, contemplating what it means to have lived this transition from 33 to 34 years of life on the planet. Sure, a birthday is just another day marking another lap we’ve danced with the Earth around the sun, bearing witness to the ebb and flow of thirteen moons in conversation with the wisdom of the stars. No small feat in itself, from where I stand; yet somehow ordinary in the practiced monotony of our everyday mundane.

Still, it’s real to me today, on my 34th birthday, to recognize that moments like this come around but once in a lifetime. And having survived an entire third of a century, in this body, with this mind, as a spirited expression of evolution, energy and consciousness conspired, feels like nothing short of a miracle from the divine. And lost forever is a moment like this if left unacknowledged, like a skinny little wrinkle in the speeding sands of time.

Especially when we consider that life gives no guarantee. That even if I live to be 100, however unlikely, a third of my life is already dead and gone. And hell, with what the latest climate science predictions foretell, this third-of-a-century I’m celebrating may actually have me well beyond the halfway point of life as we know it. And even then, there’s no telling if I’ll wake up tomorrow at sunrise or drown in the sea come sunset. Stranger things have happened, this we know for certain. But here I am, turning 34 from 33, knocking on wood like a hippy hugging the blackening branches of her favorite forest tree.

If anything, though, this skip-and-a-leap past 33-and-a-third has taught me a little bit about living and dying, in both the literal, visceral and metaphorical, sensorial sense of the thing; provoking a graduated if not childlike obsession with being and acting deliberately and willfully with every single waking day.

Last year, today, I welcomed 33 with a single candle in a pumpkin poundcake shared around the fire, to the tune of a sweet birthday song from my love. I planted my moon blood beneath a giant dying Sequoia outside the campground at Little Yosemite Valley, before summiting the sub-dome of Half Dome, living high on top of the world, blue sky and sunshine as far as the eye could see. By Halloween, I was in L.A., home alone in the camper van whose chapter in my life would be aborted as abruptly as my three-year love story, screaming itself into silence the week before, along a quiet street in San Francisco’s east bay.

Because, like a wave, in peaks and troughs, highs and lows, sometimes that’s just life, right?

Heart in my own hands now, I returned to what I wasn’t sure was home anymore, and poured myself into my work. Before year’s end, I drafted my long-standing PhD proposal, spoke on surfeminism to a roomful of surfing women, and sent out my poetry book manuscript to potential publishers. I started wondering why I would want to bother with all the trouble of a boyfriend when everything else seemed to flow so sweetly?

Still, in the eight months that followed, half-hearted attempts at reconciliation made holidays sweet and half-truths hard to bear. I felt betrayed by life, love and dreams in more ways than one. As the sun set on New Year’s Eve, our anniversary, I watched and helped three people die and survive from a serious motorbike accident along the dusty road a few miles from home, vicarious trauma wrenching my hardened heart back into being, like a shooting star right on time across the dead-black bleeding sky.

By mid-January I was in Australia, studying postcapitalist possibilities and dancing sober to the night at a psychedelic music fest among a sea of strangers, somewhere out there in the wide-open middle of nowhere. Surfing my way into solitude and trying on the overstretched skin of being sort-of single again, sisters in Bali and a full moon of seclusion in Sumba held me tight as I continued to come undone, however unbeknownst to most.

Back in Costa Rica by March, I co-hosted a surf, yoga and writing retreat with my then-estranged love who I hadn’t spoken to in months - holding space for 10 women while navigating challenging personalities and prematurely rekindling what wasn’t yet ripe for the staying. More shit hit the fan to the tune of lies and deceit, twisting my hope for trust into pain and dreams doornail dead at the seams. Come April, I escaped to the southlands for the surf-life solace of healing in the place where jungle meets the sea and my heart feels most at home. As the rains set in slowly for their season, I journeyed to the Caribbean to teach on sustainable travel among like-minded community at a bountiful permaculture farm, back-ended by the sea.

After sharing recent research on localism as a site of anticolonial resistance at a surf studies conference in San Diego, Indonesia lured me again to her shores, where I spent May and June teaching yoga, writing some big things I haven’t yet published and healing my heart at a quiet eco-resort overlooking an uncrowded right pointbreak. With a view to the sea and enough space from a reality only time away could possibly change, getting lost doing the things I love was my surest strategy for making my way back to me, wherever the hell she might be.

Absence, they say, makes the heart grow fonder. And I don’t believe they’re wrong. Distance drew me back to where my spirit yearned to be, even when possibility felt more like a self-sabotaging fantasy. I stayed gone long enough to see if the changes he promised were just as flimsy as easy words like ‘sorry’, or if my forgiveness and his fresh start might bring us together again after all these months apart. Like rosehips fallen to the Earth, could the death of our past seed the vibrant blossoming of starting anew? Could my heart reconfigure its story from victim of betrayal in all her undeserved shame, to empowered architect of healing through the mystery of a forgiveness I wasn’t sure I was capable of?

Curiosity, in the shape of love, drew me in like a cat, and I was committed to seeing. To taking one day at a time, together. We spent July traveling south to north along Costa Rica’s Pacific Coast guiding a group of students for our annual Surfing and Sustainability study abroad program, now in its eighth year running. Then, August took us to southern Mexico to learn decolonial methods for strengthening alternative economies in Chiapas, a place we both idealized as an epicenter for indigenous resistance and autonomy. We kept eachother warm in the chilly climes of the Sierra before busing to Oaxaca and catching a southeast swell at one of our favorite surf spots on Earth. Between full moon gazing and seaside sleeping, all was not well on the heart-front, and heated arguments digging at old wounds had me in tears, reconsidering whether all the forgiveness in the world could ever bridge the rage of hurt I still carried deep as gold inside my womb.

With questions and prayers, we journeyed up the winding road to San Jose del Pacifico, where the mushrooms are magic and the fast-moving clouds hold you in like blankets among the high forest, thick and unpeopled in every direction. We sweat and shed in the Zapotec tradition, bought our bundles of medicine from the hot dog lady on the corner, lit a fire at the cabin and downed our dose, sipping chocolate stirred with cinnamon and clove. The spores of mystery working with and through us, stories got sorted as generations of wounding burned to skeleton-ash among the thriving, dying flames. Colorful seeing swirled into powerful knowing, leaving a lasting imprint in the embodiment of cells renewed, spirits refreshed, hearts re-tethered in their commitment to co-creating the realities we dream to be true. Big hairy monsters turned avatar guardians of fire conspired with wild juggling monkeys and sweet laughing coyotes, carving consciousness into evolution, integrating its way into our psyche, even still, today.

…and what a long strange trip it’s been.

After years on the road and two months together again, September brought us homebound, nesting into the details of life living in a quiet home off the beaten path with a jungle view to the sea, surfing southwestern swells between seasonal rainstorms, and embarking upon the journey of cultivating our shared dream: sowing seeds of conscious change among the community we call home. It’s October now, when the rains get heavy and long days spent inside turn tricks in your mind, stirring up the dust spores from trips you left to simmer in the high-low memories of an entire year’s time.

As my clock ticks from 33 to 34, I see now more than ever before that the living needs and breeds the dying, and all I’m doing here is writing my story into being, conspiring up reality with every breath, every bite, every step, paddle stroke and wave, responsible in my own right for grabbing the puzzle pieces meant for me from the ether and putting them all together into this masterpiece miracle I have the privilege to call my imperfectly perfect, kinda big now little life.

Maybe it’s because I planted my moon blood beneath that dying giant Sequoia in Yosemite this time last year. Or maybe it’s because I was born right on time 34 years ago on a straight up half-moon straddling the Sun signs of Libra and Scorpio, holding equal parts beauty and shadow inside my stars. Whatever it is that draws me closer to experiencing life at the precipice of death, I’ve found contemplating these bleak realities more inspiring than scary; more motivating in possibility than apocalyptic in the pessimism of all those truths we collectively choose to believe.

Call me crazy, but if I’ve learned anything in this hop-skip third-of-a-century here on Earth, between climbing up mountains and getting lost in a southern sea, it’s that our living-dying realities aren’t somewhere out there waiting to be seen, but right here in the bone-trembling courage of each of us willing enough to wake up, follow our heart, put one foot in front of the other, and go do our goddamn dream.