Today is Maria’s birthday, and as has become our custom, I’m whisking her off to a hotel for one night on her birthday this year, the longest time off we dare to leave the farm in the winter.

I was going to write a poem about her, and then post one of her favorite Mary Oliver poems in her honor.

But then I realized that would be sort of redundant. Maria is a poem, how do you write a poem about something or someone who is your life?

Maria is somewhere in her 50’s, she is one of those people who is eternally young to me, because youth is not really about one’s body or age, it is really about their spirit. She will never do old talk.

Maria is brave, she is not just creative, she is fiercely creative, she dares to eat the peach and plunge barefoot into the cold ocean water.

Like her inspiration Mary Oliver, Maria is a passionate observer of life. She will not put the shell of a dead snail out into the cold all alone, her exquisite sensitivity infuses her art, and sometimes makes her difficult to live with.

“How can you stand me?,” she sometimes ask me when a dark cloud comes over her and she heads out into the woods for a walk with Fate by herself to brood and talk to trees.

How could I survive without her, is a better question for me?

I have never stopped loving her, not from the first moment I saw her standing in a doorway trying to keep her monster dog Frieda from eating me, and invited her to become an artist again in one of my barns. Talk about discernment,  I guess that was the best decision I ever made.

And the truth is,  I love Maria more each minute, each hour, each day. I’m older than I once imagined being, I have never loved more.

How can I not love someone who brought so much light and laughter and healing and art and love into my life. How can I not love someone whose identity is so strong and clear and honest, who wears her wedding dress out to shovel manure, who talks to donkeys every day of life and feeling?

Who supports me every day in every possible way, who tolerates my moods and swings, and all of the other things very few people have ever wanted to tolerate, or could.

And how could I not stand someone who, for the first time in my life, taught me how to trust love and to return it?  She is pure of spirit, lover of all things living, strong and great of heart. Her creativity is a great and beautiful force, more and more people are touched by her photos, videos beautiful art, every single day.

Maria puts the Goddesses in her art all of the time, but she is my Goddess, Cybele, Rhea, Gaai, the mother of the Titans, the Goddess Artist.

A decade ago, she took my hand in hers and said to me, “let’s go together  and live our lives, as well as we can, for as long as we can in the best way that we can.”

And that is what we do, that is the deal with struck, the contract we honor.

Happy Birthday, Wonderful Person. This is my card to you,  you are the most beautiful thing that as ever entered my world.

See you all tomorrow.