shirleytwofeathers
I found this in an email that my daughter forwarded to me way back in 2006. It’s a little bit sugary sweet for my taste, but I decided to share it here anyway.Also, it’s probably made the rounds on the internet uncountable times, and I guess I don’t care about that either. So here it is:
Subject: A NICE STORY…AND LOTS OF THINGS TO THINK ABOUT
The first day of school our professor introduced himself and challenged us to get to know someone we didn’t already know. I stood up to look around when a gentle hand touched my shoulder.
I turned around to find a wrinkled, little old lady beaming up at me with a smile that lit up her entire being.
She said, “Hi handsome. My name is Rose. I’m eighty-seven years old. Can I give you a hug?”
I laughed and enthusiastically responded, “Of course you may!” and she gave me a giant squeeze.
“Why are you in college at such a young, innocent age?” I asked.
She jokingly replied, “I’m here to meet a rich husband, get married, and have a couple of kids…”
“No seriously,” I asked. I was curious what may have motivated her to be taking on this challenge at her age.
“I always dreamed of having a college education and now I’m getting one!” she told me. After class we walked to the student union building and shared a chocolate milkshake. We became instant friends.. Every day for the next three months we would leave class together and talk nonstop. I was always mesmerized listening to this “time machine” as she shared her wisdom and experience with me.
Over the course of the year, Rose became a campus icon and she easily made friends wherever she went.
She loved to dress up and she reveled in the attention bestowed upon her from the other students. She was living it up.
At! The end of the semester we invited Rose to speak at our football banquet. I’ll never forget what she taught us. She was introduced and stepped up to the podium. As she began to deliver her prepared speech, she dropped her three by five cards on the floor. Frustrated and a little embarrassed she leaned into the microphone and simply said, “I’m sorry I’m so jittery. I gave up beer for Lent and this whiskey is killing me! I’ll never get my speech back in order so let me just tell you what I know.”
As we laughed she cleared her throat and began, “We do not stop playing because we are old; we grow old because we stop playing. There are only four secrets to staying young, being happy, and achieving success. You have to laugh and find humor every day. You’ve got to have a dream. When you lose your dreams, you die.
We have so many people walking around who are dead and don’t even know it! There is a huge difference between growing older and growing up.
If you are nineteen years old and lie in bed for one full year and don’t do one productive thing, you will turn twenty years old. If I am eighty-seven years old and stay in bed for a year and never do anything I will turn eighty-eight.
Anybody can grow older. That doesn’t take any talent or ability. The idea is to grow up by always finding opportunity in change. Have no regrets. The elderly usually don’t have regrets for what we did, but rather for things we did not do. The only people who fear death are those with Regrets.”
She concluded her speech by courageously singing “The Rose.” She challenged each of us to study the lyrics and live them out in our daily lives. At the year’s end Rose finished the college degree she had begun all those years ago.
One week after graduation Rose died peacefully in her sleep. Over two thousand college students attended her funeral in tribute to the wonderful woman who taught by example that it’s never too late to be all you can possibly be.
When you finish reading this, please send this peaceful word of advice to your friends and family, they’ll really enjoy it!
These words have been passed along in loving memory of ROSE.
- REMEMBER, GROWING OLDER IS MANDATORY. GROWING UP IS OPTIONAL.
- We make a Living by what we get, We make a Life by what we give.
- God promises a safe landing, not a calm passage. If God brings you to it, He will bring you through it.
Isn’t this fun? I think I am going to make one of these signs and attach it to my front gate.
I love this so much, I just might make one on purpose so I can hang it in my art room. And of course, I’ll have to also paint the front… and really fuck it up… lol.
So this is how I’ve been feeling lately. There are so many things I want to do RIGHT NOW that I am virtually paralyzed, and end up doing other completely different things. And this morning I thought that maybe it would be helpful… emphasis on MAYBE… to make a list. So here it is!
All the things I want to do right now:
- Re-scan my Middle of the Night Art with a higher resolution so that I can start to put all those cool pictures on nifty stuff at Red Bubble… so that I can buy some of it for myself.
- Get my little Middle of the Night Art website up and running so I can see all the pictures and pick the ones to put on Red Bubble.
- Hook up my other PC, and my scanner, and get it turned on and up and running so that I can do the above stuff.
- Oh… and go buy a new strip so that I can hook up that PC and all the stuff that goes to it.
- Update all the static web pages on the site so that there is a link to the Middle of the Night Art site that people can actually find and click on.
- Do a Medicine Wheel.
- Get all the Medicine Wheel information from a class I gave on Medicine Wheels uploaded to the Feathers and Bones site.
- Make a Medicine Wheel bag that I can take with me wherever I go.
- Create some Medicine Wheel art for my Magick Room.
- Go treasure hunting at some thrift stores and look for cool stuff for the Medicine Wheel bag or whatever else I might find that’s cool and interesting.
- Find all the paperwork for a class on shamanism that I took a long time ago.
- Post all that information on Feathers and Bones.
- Take a Shamanic Journey … or two … or three…
- Go for a walk in the woods and see what happens.
- Redo the preliminary exercises in the shamanism class.
- Repaint the bathroom.
- Replace or recover the bathroom floor.
- Fix the toilet that is wobbly and crooked.
- Make more art for the bathroom.
- Oh… and clean said bathroom really really well.
- Make a cool shelving unit out of legos for the bathroom so I will have a place to put stuff in there.
- Organize all my movies and take the ones I’ll never watch again in and trade them for store credit or other different better movies.
- Do the same thing with all my TV shows that I have on DVD.
- Do a seance with a bunch of fun like minded people, in a cool place with a great ambiance, and lots of love laughter and wine.
- Reupholster and fix the couch.
- Paint the living room a yummy orange.
- Rip out the carpet and fix the floor and put something beautiful on it… maybe paint it and get some cool rugs… or put in new flooring… or just get new carpet… but for crying out loud, get rid of what’s on the floor right now. It’s so ugly.
- Get all the posts that are currently on my Gypsy Magic blogger blog transferred to the various Magick and Mystery sites. Every single one! All of them!
- Finally finish moving the old old old static web pages that are still up but not connected to anything really. There is some stuff on Color Therapy, Transcendental Meditation, and some Quotes… all of which need to be moved somewhere that they can be seen.
- Go camping with just me and my dog and really get quiet and centered.
- Clean the bird cage… well… I don’t really WANT to do this, but it needs to be done.
- Get the grass mowed where I am going to put in the new fence and plan that all out.
- Somehow manage to get all that new fencing here, and get the fence put up so that Opie and I can have a bigger nicer yard and a gate that actually opens in winter.
- Well… I don’t really care if it opens at all in the winter… but a nice good wide gate so I can use the riding lawnmower to do the yard would be a huge bonus.
- Mow a bunch of pathways in through the overgrown dense whatever you want to call it that used to be a corn field, and then became a field of wild flowers when I had sheep to keep it mowed down, but which now is totally thick with underbrush and poison ivy and god knows what else.
- Make a magickal labyrinth like the one I used to have before I had lawnmower issues and then got depressed and then got busy and then got more depressed and then a bunch of shit happened and then suddenly it is totally gone and replaced by bushes and trees and … yes … poison ivy.
- Clean out the closet where the hot water heater is so that I can get someone to come out and put in a new one because not having hot water really sucks ass.
- Go through and totally clean out all the boxes that are piled in what used to be my bedroom but which is now the “cat room” since my dog hates the cats and the cats hate my dog and I don’t want anyone massacred in my house, so I sleep in the living room, and the “cat room” has become a repository for stuff I need to sort and throw away or keep and put away.
- Clean up my art room so I can actually go in there and do art.
- Make some more small paintings with fingernail polish… because that was fun and I have some ideas.
- Finish all my zen tangle pictures that I started and then left hanging.
- Work on my 100 things project.
- Paint that cute little bird house I found and then do a magick spell where I entice all my house demons and bad juju entities to climb in and go for a ride… and take them someplace else where they can live happily ever after NOT in my house.
- Make a place for Saskia outside where there is a chair, and a shade tree, a small table, flowers, wind chimes, a place for candles, and whatever else seems right so that I can feel that her spirit would be comfortable here if she wanted to visit, and so that if I wanted to, I could sit out there and remember how much I love her.
- Charge my brand new shock collar that I spent a bunch of money on.
- Do some serious training with my dog so that I can use that collar to teach him to come when called no matter what, and that it is NOT okay to try to kill the cats. And also it would be nice if he knew how to heel and stay.
- Get a bunch more posts up on the Encyclopedia of Herbology so that I can look herbs up and see what they are good for.
- Upload all the Reiki 2nd Degree information from my class paperwork to Twofeathers Reiki.
- Make a Reiki box.
- Get the Pagan Calendar totally updated… the whole thing… for the whole year.
- Make a cool orange fur bag with Sunny so that her dream can come true and… well… it sounds fun and cool.
- Read the books I ordered.
- Get the Prosperity Project up and running again, and actually do it ahead of time so that I’m not scrambling every day to get it posted.
- Build a bottle wall.
- Make a sweat lodge.
- Actually do a sweat… somewhere, even if it’s not here…. but go to one or something.
- Upload all of my “how to make a sweat lodge” information to Feathers and Bones so that I’ll know how to do it when I have the area mowed and a place for the fire that won’t be a hazard and burn the entire place up.
- Paint the Front Door.
- Build a porch or small deck so that my dog and I will have a place to sit outside and enjoy ourselves.
- Figure out what my password is to my email on my phone so that I can deal with my email on my smart phone instead of having to do it on my laptop which is a huge pain in the ass.
- Make an appointment for a massage for me and Sky.
- Actually comb my hair so that later today I can take a shower at Sydney’s house and get my hair washed without having to do it with a COLD shower which is no fun and actually quite miserable unless it’s a really hot day which it isn’t.
- Take Layla someplace fun and interesting.
- Go to the beach.
- Do the old book idea that I had the other day which requires either my scanner to be hooked up and running, or a good graphics program that will render a bunch of text.
- Back up all the files on my laptop. I haven’t done that in a while… and it’s time. Only thing is, it will take forever because there is so much! Sigh!
- Take Sydney to a bakery because she’s been wanting to go to a bonafide bakery for a really long time and I keep promising but I never quite get it done.
- Go out somewhere on a high hill, where it’s pretty and quiet, a gravel road in an area that no one actually lives in… and do the “Let It Go Bouncing Down The Road” spell that I have in my mind but haven’t actually written or posted.
- Get all the memes in my meme folder uploaded to Meme City.
- Post a bunch of stuff to More Cool Pictures and Way Cool Pictures so that I can sift through my collected images more easily since there will be a lot fewer of them.
- Clean out my “cats” folder by posting everything I have collected so far on It’s A CatAstrophe, because that folder is ridiculously full and I’m tired of looking at it.
- Make a really cool … super uber spectacularly cool gift for anyone who happens to actually read this entire list from start to finish.
Ok… so that about sums it up for right now this minute. I’m sure that after I post this I’ll think of even more things that I want to do.
If an image has posted without permission please leave a comment and I will happily remove it, replace it, give credit, link love ~ whatever you prefer.
I think it's time to go shopping... maybe even buy some really cool stuff at my online shops!!
