✦
A 25TH BIRTHDAY MEDITATION & KEEPSAKE
A Quarter Century
of Light
FOR SIMIKA'S 25TH BIRTHDAY
⚬
Twenty-five years of living, twenty-five years of light,
A quarter century unfolding through the day and through the night.
Not the halfway mark, not the resting place—
Just the quiet opening of a longer, braver grace.
You don’t need to have it figured out today,
No grand declaration, no perfect words to say.
Let the candles wait, let the room be still,
The future will keep, and it always will.
From a first cry in Princeton to Pacific rain,
Each city you’ve lived in has shaped you again—
More yourself, more true, more quietly sure,
Twenty-five stars, and a sky still wide and pure.
And all the while, you held the smallest hands,
Through behavioral health work and early learning lands,
Forty families, nine sites, a hundred more—
You made the hard work look like an open door.
🎙 A RECORDED READING
Press play to hear the poem read aloud.
Sit back, and let the light hold you.
Sit back, and let the light hold you.
This keepsake honors the first quarter century of a life still being written:
not a finish line, not a fixed portrait, but a quiet honoring of everything
that has brought you here, and everything still ahead.
A QUARTER CENTURY OF LIGHT • A BIRTHDAY KEEPSAKE & MEDITATION
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.
the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.