Tellurium - on turning 52

“It’s such a lucky accident, having been born, that we’re almost obliged to pay attention.”

Last night I dreamed of tellurium — bright, angular planes rising and sinking like metallic waves. Not the dull metalloid from the diagrams of my schoolbooks, but something luminous. It struck me only afterward that tellurium is element 52, and in a few weeks, I will be 52 myself.

This feels especially meaningful because my 51st year was the year of Antimony — element 51, the metalloid of contradictions. Antimony has always belonged to the borderlands: not quite metal, not quite nonmetal, brittle yet striking. Historically it lived in those old, difficult medicines meant to purge illness, to force the body through rough transformations. I understand that now in a way I never hoped to.

Fifty-one was a year of treatment and recovery — a year that demanded steadiness I wasn’t sure I had. There were long stretches of quiet work beneath the surface, the slow stitching-back-together of a life. Antimony became, in its own strange way, a fitting emblem: an element that endures extremes and emerges altered, but still itself.

And now I am ready to leave Antimony behind.

Tellurium, element 52, is a quieter thing. Rare, crystalline, slightly enigmatic. On its own it can seem fragile, but in the right company it becomes stabilizing, even transformative. It adds strength without fanfare. I find comfort in that. At 52, I don’t feel the need to be abundant or dramatic; it is enough to be present in the places where I matter, to lend steadiness where I can.

When I discovered I had stage three cancer earlier this year, fifty-two felt … remote, but now it feels almost like a threshold — not an ending, but a gentle beginning. As if another layer of life is about to settle into shape, quieter but somehow more illuminated.

So I step from Antimony into Tellurium, from a year of hard passages into a year I hope will be clearer, steadier, and touched with a quieter kind of radiance.

Here’s to element 52, and to discovering what new structure this next year will take.

“Timing is everything. Just for a moment, in the pause before the earth rotates again into night, the cave is flooded with light. The near-nothingness of Schistostega aka Goblin’s Gold erupts in a shower of sparkles, like green glitter spilled on the rug at Christmas… And then, within minutes, it’s gone. All its needs are met in an ephemeral moment at the end of the day when the sun aligns with the mouth of the cave… Each shoot is shaped like a feather, flat and delicate. The soft blue green fronds stand up like a glad of translucent ferns, tracking the path of the sun. It is so little. And yet it is enough.” - The Magic of Moss and What It Teaches Us About the Art of Attentiveness to Life at All Scales