Do you want the MoM plate or the WoW plate?
1. I share a birthday with Enya and the Ayatollah Khomeini.
2. It takes a long time to make 62 wishes.
3. For most of our years as friends, my good friend Alwyn would never tell me her age, but once she turned 80, a few years back, she bragged about it to anyone who would listen.
4. The true origins of Mother’s Day began in America in 1870 when Julia Ward Howe wrote a Mother’s Day Proclamation calling for women to stand up against the unjust violence of war through their roles as wife and mother, to protest the futility of their sons killing other mothers’ sons. More HERE.
5. I can always tell when it’s my birthday by what is in bloom. In Massachusetts it was lilacs. Here it’s Iris.
6. When I leave the house in a loud print top, doubt creeps in and I begin to feel like a phony. If the loud print top is made of polyester it would be enough to send me back home to change.
7. Years ago my friends and I decided that something was missing from the triple Goddess archetype – the Maiden, Mother and Crone –which symbolizes the stages of the female life cycle and of the moon phases. Because we live longer and don’t believe we are crones till we’re at least in our 70’s, we decided to embrace the idea of the Maiden, Mother, Matriarch and Crone.
8. The last of the packing comes down to one question / should I bring extra shoes or make room for a book / Guide to a Happy Life? / I’m still looking for a good Sinatra recording / because he was to your generation / what the Beatles were to mine / and music is a memory that doesn’t skip … The rest of this poem can be read HERE.
9. For my 60th birthday I soaked in a tub of weightlessness. Floating on what felt like a heated cloud of jiggling jello, I had a cold cloth on my forehead and someone was massaging my feet. I had dinner with a Scottish man who was at John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Bed-in for Peace, and breakfast with a renowned golf course architect and his wife. I sipped a St. Bernardus beer on tap in a pub with titled glasses that looked like they were falling over and tasted skate wing for the first time. Read the conclusion to my 60th birthday post HERE.
10. Maybe age is a clock to wake us from dreaming, or maybe it is the dream, like counting the number of pages in a book when we should be reading the story.
11. Top Ten Reasons to Ban Gay Marriage HERE.
12. If he’s good enough for Betty White … HERE.
13. The best “give them a piece of your mind” letter should go to Harper Lee when she stood up for her Pulitzer Prize winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird after a school in Virginia banned it in the late 60’s for being “immoral.” She told them what she thought in no uncertain terms and with style and scathing wit that’s proved what a good writer she was. See HERE.
May 17th, 2012 12:45 am
#7. Maiden, Mother, Matriarch and Crone.
I like your idea of these four, but years ago I came up with a different fourth season of life from looking at my art piece. So I photographed my maid-mother-crone hanging and wrote up a post to share with you this morning:
http://bonniesbooks.blogspot.com/2012/05/maid-mother-crone.html
I also posted a smaller picture of it in 2010:
http://bonniesbooks.blogspot.com/2010/08/five-senses-six-seven.html
May 17th, 2012 1:43 am
Happy Birthday, Colleen!
And psst…you reversed the author’s name for TKAMB. I reread that last year and loved it as much as i did the first time around back in high school.
May 17th, 2012 3:59 am
Happy birthday 🙂
I don’t know about this crone business. Í vote for the extra step too.
May 17th, 2012 4:14 am
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, Dear Colleen….
I LOVE the Letter that Harper Lee wrote to the Hanover people…..It’s a GREAT Book, and a superlative film, too….!
Another fabulous T13, my dear….Also love that Betty White came out for Obama…Good For Her!
May 17th, 2012 7:33 am
Happy Birthday, Colleen! I love the Matriarch addition! Excellent! And I love the letter from Harper Lee. Another wonderful TT.
May 17th, 2012 9:06 am
Happy Birthday!
May 17th, 2012 9:09 am
Have the happiest of days on your special day!
I like #7 ! I can’t even believe the 10 top reasons to ban Gay marriages is even real! where the heck did you find that?
I wish I was floating in the heated jello bath right now! HAPPY BIRTHDAY!! xo
May 17th, 2012 11:37 am
Yes Bonnie, the triple Goddess archetype also rushes past the child stage, right to maiden. Here’s a link to my croning ceremony: http://looseleafnotes.com/wp/2007/05/from-first-holy-communion-to-community-croning/
I seem to have a mental block on the name of the author of To Kill a Mockingbird. In the last post I wrote about her I had it reversed and correct at different places throughout the entry, until someone brought it to my attention and I corrected it. http://looseleafnotes.com/wp/2012/04/erma-bombeck-meets-lee-harper/
May 17th, 2012 4:23 pm
Happy Birthday, Colleen!
Maiden, Mother, Matriarch and Crone-great idea!
And I loved the “Top Ten Reasons to Ban Gay Marriage.” 🙂
May 17th, 2012 4:40 pm
Happy Birthday, Colleen 🙂 Hmmm…I’ve only made Maiden. Mother ain’t gonna happen, and so neither is Matriarch. Crone, now, that just might 🙂
What a beautiful place that Spa is…
Yay for Betty White! And Harper Lee 🙂
May 17th, 2012 7:31 pm
My first visit here — re: #9, I think you know how to live!
May 17th, 2012 8:43 pm
Happy birthday, Colleen. I hope you’ve had a wonderful day.
I remember reading about your croning ceremony when I was still a new blogger in 2007.
(And I’m the one who emailed you about “Lee Harper” last time, though I missed it today.)
May 17th, 2012 9:50 pm
want to leave this link for you…Billy Collins
http://www.ted.com/talks/billy_collins_everyday_moments_caught_in_time.html
TED TALKS
May 18th, 2012 11:02 am
That was great, Rob! Billy Collins is such an inspiration to me. Mouse arson, dollhouse people, mental slippage … there’s a horror movie in there somewhere … and who else but Collins would write about that?
Thank you all for the birthday wishes!