Loose Leaf Notes

1. George Santos is the Anna Sorokin of politics.

2. I just did my first online Zoom poetry reading with a group of dVerse poets from around the world. It was a good experience and the host was wonderful, but it was a little like contra dancing as opposed to free style dance. I love to dance on my own, and I like contra dancing too, but it can be a little too intensely social for me.

3. Posted on Facebook the day David Crosby died: I’m glad you didn’t cut your hair.

4. Then I went about singing it all day

5. The Poetry Bank Account: I gave it all away / spent it all in one place / Now I’m doubting / my literary ability / and checking the sofas / for loose change

6. I have an imaginary sister blog called “loose change” as opposed to “loose leaf notes.”

7. Zoom Meetings remind me of Hollywood squares meets the Brady Bunch.

8. “When in doubt, zoom out. Ignore the cult of doom and gloom and embrace the cause of zoom and boom. We will laugh at the stupidity of evil and hate, and summon the brilliance of praise and create. Life is crazily in love with us-wildly and innocently in love with us. The universe always gives us exactly what we need, exactly when we need it.” – Rob Brezsny

9. Astrologer/musician Rob Brezsny uses first-person narrative in his horoscope columns, as well as a more literary approach than conventional horoscopes use. He conceives of astrology not as a science but as “a poetic language of the soul”, comparing it to “a Neruda poem, Kandinsky paintings or a Nick Cave song.” The Utne Reader described the column as “a blend of spontaneous poetry, feisty politics, and fanciful put-on.” Brezsny is quoted as saying “I’m on a mission to save people from the genocide of the imagination,” and told the NYT that his “secret agenda” is “to be a poet who gets paid for writing poetry.” “I predict the present. I don’t believe in predicting the future,” he said.

10. She liked tunnels but not bridges / rooms rather than open floor plans / documentaries more than biopics / and gingerbread more than brownies… From Self Portrait in Eulogy

11. My Death Class Poetry Reading with my fellow poet friend Katherine is in the news HERE. 

12. Next Stop on the Soulful Aging Tour: Reveries of the Mind: We might forget a name but remember what is beautiful. We might revere a memory or re-name cognitive decline as “transcendence.” Taking our leave takes time… More HERE. 

13. “Our fear of death is like our fear that summer will be short, but when we have had our swing of pleasure, our fill of fruit, and our swelter of heat, we say we have had our day.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson

____________Thirteen Thursday

We’re losing our minds and acting our age with an honest delving into the expanding horizon that comes with the narrowing of life.

We’re working on it. It’s a trio this time.  Katherine Chantal and I will be joined by Mary Wiley for our next Soulful Aging poetry reading.

We might forget a name but remember what is beautiful. We might revere a memory or re-name cognitive decline as “transcendence.”

Taking our leave takes time.

“Do you know I’m leaving / That the door is within sight / As you go about living…” Mary asks.

“Show me yourself / I will hold your gaze / of eternal love / Even when you slip away / into moments…” Katherine says.

“If life’s creation can’t be destroyed / but only changes form / then nothing is ever thrown away / It just moves from room to room…” suggests Colleen.

More to come…

_________Poets and Storytellers United 

-The following is an article by Neil Harvey on the Death and Bereavement class that Katherine Chantal and I were invited to read our poetry for. It appeared in Radford University’s Highlanders in the News January 13, 2022

Robert Frost said poetry occurs “when an emotion has found its thought, and the thought has found words.”

Frost won four Pulitzer Prizes in his field and knew well of what he spoke, so in light of his perspective, it makes sense that writing could also be useful as a tool in counseling.

About two dozen Radford University graduate students in the course “Death, Loss, Grief and Bereavement” recently got firsthand experience with poems as therapy, initially as an audience and then as composers of their own works.

“One of the things that we look at is the use of the creative arts as a way for people who are grieving to express themselves,” explained Alan Forrest, Ed.D., a professor in the Department of Counselor Education. “And the general goal of grief therapy is to help people externalize the wide array of different emotions that they’re experiencing internally, through the creative arts, and in this particular case, through poetry, both listening to poetry and then talking about it.”

On Nov. 8, 2022, Forrest invited two local authors to his class – Colleen Redman and Katherine Chantal. Over the past months, the pair have given interactive readings at the Little River Poetry Festival and Floyd, Virginia’s Jesse Peterman Memorial Library, among other stops.

Chantal recently published “Poetic Memoir of a Nascent Senescent: Poems from My Sixties,” and Redman is the author of numerous books, including 2004’s “The Jim and Dan Stories,” in which she wrote about losing two brothers in the same year.

The authors read to the class – pieces largely about loss – then asked the audience to share their own similar reflections.

“The last hour of the night was spent with the students, reading their heartfelt and poetic statements that came from talking,” Redman wrote of the experience in a post on her blog. “There were goosebumps, sighs and knowing nods. It was a meaningful sharing all around.”

She recently said she believes almost any art can be applied to counseling, particularly writing.

“You’re putting into words things that can’t be put into words, so you’re doing it indirectly. Poetry can help. You can use metaphors; you can get even deeper,” she said, citing the example of her own work and her writing about the passing of her brothers.

“Not only did I feel like it made me a better writer and gave me confidence, it helped me through my grief,” Redman said. “I feel like it made me a better person to have the experience of that loss and to feel and understand that when they left, a part of me left, but a part of them lives in me.”

“And I think [the students] have to be empathetic to be able to be good counselors. To be able to witness grief and sit with it and not be uncomfortable … and just witness people.”

The poetry was also in line with the course’s primary tracks, which are the academic as well as the practical.

“They’re learning the different theory strategies and therapeutic interventions to use and working with clients, which is important because we’re a professional training program,” Forrest explained.

“Another thing that is of equal if not greater importance is for them to become aware of their own thoughts, feelings, beliefs about death and loss, grief and bereavement, so that when they are sitting in the sacred space of a therapy room, and those issues come up, they don’t freeze.”

Whitney Harrison, a graduate student from Giles County who’s studying clinical mental health, participated in the exercise and wrote about the various paths her life had taken, routes that led her through both academia and motherhood.

“I found it to be incredibly powerful because poetry is not something that you’re taught in a class to necessarily do with people,” Harrison said. “And yet, being in that room and watching all these people share their feelings, different things came out for different people, and it was very impactful for everyone.

“It obviously moved several people,” she added. “And I think if you’re going to be vulnerable, being vulnerable in a room full of future counselors is the place to be. Incredibly safe. And the poets themselves were just so warm and accepting and inviting in that space.” -Neil Harvey

I gave it all away
spent it all in one place
Now I’m doubting
my literary ability
and checking the sofas
for loose change

__________Colleen Redman / Poets and Storytellers United

1. Yes, we’ve been watching the Monty Python documentary on Netflix.

2. And with episodes in 6 parts, it really is the Full Monty.

3. Just when I think nothing is happening, something does.

4. Like venison cooking lessons with my 14-year-old grandson who shot his first deer this year.

5. I love to look at pictures that involve the Droste effect, which is something like a never-ending fractal. When I was a kid, we had a book with a picture of a woman holding a book with a picture of her holding a book on the cover, and so on, that I studied and wondered how far it went.

6. “The “Droste effect,” is named after a 1904 package of Droste brand cocoa. The mathematical interest in these packaging illustrations is their implied infinity. If the resolution of the printing process—(and the determination and eyesight of the illustrator)—were not limiting factors, it would go on forever. A package within a package within a package… Like Russian dolls.” Wikipedia

7. I’m a member.

8. This is my practice: “The mystic Thomas a Kempis said that when you go out into the world, you return having lost some of yourself. Until you learn to inhabit your aloneness, the lonely distraction and noise of society will seduce you into false belonging, with which you will only become empty and weary. When you face your aloneness, something begins to happen. Gradually, the sense of bleakness changes into a sense of true belonging. This is a slow and open-ended transition but it is utterly vital in order to come into rhythm with your own individuality. In a sense this is the endless task of finding your true home within your life. It is not narcissistic, for as soon as you rest in the house of your own heart, doors and windows begin to open outwards to the world. No longer on the run from your aloneness, your connections with others become real and creative. You no longer need to covertly scrape affirmation from others or from projects outside yourself. This is slow work; it takes years to bring your mind home.” John O’Donohue

9. The sun was her psychedelic of choice / The ocean her love language / Her childhood heroes were Annie Oakley and Peter Pan / A camera was the first thing she bought / after getting paid for her first job at a daycare… Read The Eulogy in its entirety HERE. 

10. “I woke to the sound of nurses by my bed, discussing their Christmas plans. I thought I was talking to them, but they didn’t reply. I was aware of an existence, a me within my body. Had I disappeared?” Those are the words of Lotje Sodderland, the video diarist who suffered a traumatic brain injury from a stroke and is the subject of the Netflix documentary My Beautiful Broken Brain.

12. She also said this about her state following the brain injury: “It’s a heightened sense of reality. Euphoric. I can experience colors and sounds like I wasn’t able to before. So intensified. So exaggerated. Time has a new meaning. It’s all elongated and transient…  Recovery is learning to live a new life, and so in that way it is a re-birth and you realize that recovery is a chance to recreate your life and it’s a chance to kind of, make your song, your personality, the way you want it to be. . .The more hope I have about how things will get better, the more I recover.”

13. I learned that writing and reading are based in entirely different parts of the brain, meaning Lotje could learn to write again, but she couldn’t read what she had written.  She also said to deal with what the brain couldn’t do she had to focus on what matters, which often wasn’t reading or writing.

________Thirteen Thursday

Colleen Redman grew up as one of nine siblings on a peninsula in the South Shore of Boston, MA during the ‘50s – ‘60s.  Since 1991, she has lived with her husband in a cabin off the scenic Blue Ridge Parkway in Floyd, a rural Virginia county known for its mountain culture, roots music, small farm homesteads and a flourishing art scene, which she relocated to in 1985.  She has two grown sons and two grandsons, keeps a small flock of chickens and tends a large garden. She is a blogger (looseleafnotes.com) who has written and photographed extensively for The Floyd Press newspaper and other regional publications.  Her poetry has most recently been published in the Artemis Journal and Floyd County Moonshine.

Losing two brothers a month apart in 2001 was a life-changing event that spurred Redman’s study of death and was the impetus behind her 2003 book The Jim and Dan Stories, which was included in a curriculum for a Radford University grief and loss class for counselors before it went out of print. With the loss of her brothers, Redman let herself descend into “the trenches of grief’s frontline.” She wrote, “If I can describe what I see from inside this hole, will it help others when they are down in one? What place is this? How deep does it go? I want to know. I’ve never been here before.” Her brothers’ deaths were followed by the passing of her father, her older sister and mother.

In 2017, Redman’s poetry collection Packing a Suitcase for the Afterlife was published by Finishing Line Press and reviewed by poet and creative writing teacher Felicia Mitchell:  “She has, paradoxically, told the untold , touching on that which resides both in dreams and in life and in the borders between…” Poet and novelist Jim Minick wrote: “Loss tempered by wonder, love radiating like the moon (a bowl fired by the sun”), these poems track a life, playful yet dark, frank and funny, yet somber…”

Packing a Suitcase for the Afterlife was followed by the 2021 publication of Objects are Closer Than They Appear, described by the poet as “a distillation through the rear-view mirror of poetic memoir where every remnant pulled from a dream or a memory resonates with an afterlife, as if a visitation from the same place my dead loved ones are, closer than they seem.”

As with her first two poetry collections, the poems that appear in Poems from the Dark Room are the basis of Redman’s “Grief and Relief: Soulful Aging Tour,” the call-and-response poetry readings that she does with fellow poet and author of Poetic Memoir of a Nascent Senescent, Katherine Chantal. They represent a deepening and a charting of the inner-life adventure, one that has come closest to touching and trusting the mysteries of life and death, one that brings the grace of grief full circle.  You vow not to forget / love’s lasting imprint / when life has been spent / and time no longer counts you…

NOTE- Poems from the Darkroom is available for purchase at Amazon for $13 and in Floyd at The Harvest Moon Food Store and The Floyd Country Store.

She liked tunnels but not bridges
rooms rather than open floor plans
documentaries more than biopics
and gingerbread more than brownies

She teared-up when she saw
Andrew Wyeth’s art in a D.C. museum
and listened to every song
that Mark Knopfler ever recorded

She said, “I always feel more prepared
when I have a toy in my pocketbook”
and “Whenever I don’t know what it is I’m doing
and it borders on wasting my time, I call it research”

She liked to people watch and thrift shop
She marched for peace and cherished children
She said, “As far as I can determine, I’m a Jungian Taoist
who might have been a Transcendentalist
if I lived in the time of Emerson and Thoreau”

She wasn’t a leader or a follower
but a party of one, she said
“I’m a fiscally conservative independent
who votes Democrat because they represent my views
on civil rights, women’s rights, labor rights
and the environment better than their counterpart”

Her Irish ear for words took root in childhood
with nursery rhymes, fairytales and jump rope songs
and she knew she was meant to be a poet
after hearing Leonard Cohen sing Suzanne

The sun was her psychedelic of choice
The ocean her love language
Her childhood heroes were Annie Oakley and Peter Pan
A camera was the first thing she bought
after getting paid for her first job at a daycare

As she got older she said, “I’m writing poetry
that lets the psyche guide the itinerary
because the days are small, packed tightly together,
not much room for last minute changes”

Bird watcher, shell collector, tea drinker, vegetable gardener
She was a long hauler before there was a name for it
Her friend Luke said she danced
like a pollinating bee going for nectar
She was a beach town girl who went back to the land
to live in a cabin and keep a flock of chickens

Being mother to her two sons
was the highlight of her life
Marrying her husband Joe the reward
Her siblings were the song of her heart
Her grandchildren the charmed encore

She liked to quote Eknath Easwaran
about choosing only one mantra for meditation
‘If you dig shallow wells in many places
you will never go deep enough to find water’
“And that applies to life,” she said

In her poetry book “Packing a Suitcase for the After Life”
she wrote, “In lieu of death send the living flowers
Make your life payable to all those you love”

______________Colleen Redman / Poets and Storytellers United / dVerse Poets Pub

1. Gavel or grovel?

2. I was sure I was going to see another on camera slap when Kevin McCarthy walked up to Matt Gaetz HERE.

3. “When the North Star of your own faith is becoming obscured, when you feel as if you’re in stormy seas and low visibility, who are the lighthouses? John Lennon was ours.” U2’s Bono on John

4. “Leonard Cohen said his teacher once told him that the older you get, the lonelier you become, and the deeper the love you need. This is because, as we go through life, we tend to over-identify with being the hero of our stories. This hero isn’t exactly having fun: he’s getting kicked around, humiliated, and disgraced. But if we can let go of identifying with him, we can find our rightful place in the universe, and a love more satisfying than any we’ve ever known. People constantly throw around the term “hero’s journey” without having any idea what it really means. Everyone from CEOs to wellness influencers thinks the hero’s journey means facing your fears, slaying a dragon, and gaining 25k followers on Instagram. But that’s not the real hero’s journey…

5. “…In the real hero’s journey, the dragon slays YOU. Much to your surprise, you couldn’t make that marriage work. Much to your surprise, you turned forty with no kids, no house, and no prospects. Much to your surprise, the world didn’t want the gifts you proudly offered it. If you are foolish, this is where you will abort the journey and start another, and another, abusing your heart over and over for the brief illusion of winning. But if you are wise, you will let yourself be shattered, and return to the village, humbled, but with a newfound sense that you don’t have to identify with the part of you that needs to win, needs to be recognized, needs to know. This is where your transcendent life begins.” – Paul Weinfield

6. I’ve been looking for a word to describe the stage of life I am now inhabiting, the time after childhood, romance, finding vocation, raising kids and experiencing the joy of little grandkids. Some people call the slowing down of elder years, the golden years, but I think “the transcendent years” is a better description, as in the beginning of living beyond the range of normal or merely human experience, a delving into and readying for experiences that takes you out of yourself and into something larger and beyond comprehension. It’s a long stage, as was the other stages, one that takes time.

7. From the Merriam Webster dictionary:  Did you know? The Latin verb scandere means “to climb”, so transcend has the basic meaning of climbing so high that you cross some boundary. A transcendent experience is one that takes you out of yourself and convinces you of a larger life or existence; in this sense, it means something close to “spiritual,” or as I like to say, Become the air for others to breathe, a memory that floats like a fragrance.

8. I once got through being stuck on the road in a snowstorm for hours by imagining that I had died. I was separated from my family but knew they would get by and could live their lives without me. I was busy navigating this new situation and doing what I needed to do to acclimate, just like if I was dead, I imagined.

9. My skin thins translucent / like frosted glass on a night sky view / where a veil is lifting / on an obscured constellation / that tracks the arc of life / It landmarks the ages / as my form rearranges / diffusing before it passes / before the soul eclipses / the body’s last remains… Read Eclipse in its entirety HERE.

10. HERE’S a review of my poetry collection Poems From the Dark Room and here’s my blogger poet friend Ron with the collection. It was captioned “Just got the mail. Fine reading ahead, I’m SURE.  Thanks, CR!”

11. I just bought a new voice recorder but there were no instructions on use except for a sentence saying that the instructions were on the device internally, but how can I find the instructions without instructions for how to find them.

“…all you can manage, lying / in the still-dark darkness / is to tell yourself that you’re / not really there, your eyes / aren’t really open yet, you’re / happy living in the dark…” Read Ron’s poem Annual Postponement in its entirety HERE. 

13. Life is stranger than fiction. The proof is HERE.

__________Thirteen Thursday

“My own soul was moved and deepened as I read this poetry memoir by Colleen Redman. I love the way she speaks of letting the soul have the right of way as she faces the latter part of her lifetime. Having looked back and honored the grief from her losses of family members she now turns toward a “widening horizon with the narrowing of life” in the poem “The Last Dance”. In the poem “Surprise Endings” she speaks of retreating “in solitude…until life’s puzzle is nearly finished and I can add my piece to the whole.” And then resolves this with a superb closing stanza, “But don’t look too close/ or you’ll miss the full picture/ where everyone is a beautiful loner/ where we all belong to each other.” 

Colleen has clearly been “apprenticing herself to her own disappearance” as the poet David Whyte instructs us all to do so we deepen our soul’s knowing in our elder years. This book is a great find for any person whose life has been touched by loss or who is courageous enough to face the future loss of their own life. One of my favorites in the many gems in this collection of poetic jewels is “The Magic Trick”, which starts with this stanza: “It takes years of prep/ for the magic trick/ of being here one minute/ and gone the next.” – Joe Klein, Licensed Professional Counselor

NOTE- Poems from the Darkroom is available for purchase at Amazon for $13 and in Floyd at The Harvest Moon Food Store and The Floyd Country Store.

My mouth is slowly disappearing
like a shoreline receding
a basin emptying
into a shrinking waterway
of winding lines

My hair is fading
like a bleached coral reef
as my timeline is rising
on the way to eternity

My skin thins translucent
like frosted glass on a night sky view
where a veil is lifting
on an obscured constellation
that tracks the arc of life

It landmarks the ages
as my form is rearranging
diffusing before it passes
before the soul eclipses
the body’s last remains

____________Colleen Redman / Poets and Storytellers United

1. I’m pushing the year to a close, rushing to turn the calendar’s page, to clean the slate and start afresh, to meet the inevitable unknown.

2. I wonder if my line, ‘I don’t ever want an avatar’ will go the same way as ‘I don’t ever want an answering machine,’ which I didn’t want until someone gave me one.

3. “I made a New Year’s Resolution, decades ago, to make no more New Year’s Resolutions. It is the only resolution that I never broke.” -Seen on Facebook

4. NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTION by Fred LaMotte: “Don’t go, just arrive. Rest the mind in the heart. Dissolve your pronouns in ‘Thou.’ Talk to the animals. Smile for no reason at 3 A.M. Instead of asking, “what have I attained?” let everything around you become exceedingly awake, raindrop, silence, stars. Discover the secret treasure in the place where you already are by not searching. Breath happens. Just arrive.”

5. Some days are like this.

6. Joe wonders how I get lost in cities, have no sense of direction and am anxious about highway overpasses and exits, but can find my way around a scrabble board, see the all the openings, fit multiple words in small spaces and sort out the letters to make something valuable when it just looks like a jumble of letters to him.

7. I knew I was meant to be a poet when I heard Leonard Cohen sing Suzanne and when I read Leo Lionni’s children’s book about a field mouse named Fredrick who didn’t save nuts and work to prepare for winter like the other mice. He saved colors and words and then saved the day by reciting poems when it was cold and the food ran out.

8. I lean towards Taoism and Wu Wei, “the practice Taoism of letting one’s action follow the simple and spontaneous course of nature rather than interfering with the harmonious working of universal law by imposing arbitrary and artificial forms.” –  Merriam-Webster

9. I also lean towards the Wise Woman Tradition and Susun Weed’s six steps of healing, the first of which is “do nothing,” followed by Collect information, Engage the energy, nourish and tonify before stimulate and sedate, use drugs or break and enter.

10. “The Dali Lama says you can only begin a real meditation on life with a meditation on death. Gothic stuff but something in it. Finiteness and infiniteness are the two poles of the human experience. Everything we do, think, feel, imagine, discuss is framed by the notion of whether our death is the end or the beginning of something else.” Bono

11. “Going home / Without my sorrow / Going home / Sometime tomorrow / To where it’s better / Than before / Going home / Without my burden / Going home / Behind the curtain / Going home / Without the costume / That I wore…” From Going Home by Leonard Cohen

12. “Bah” is not “fah“ – “As philosophers have suspected, and neuroscientists prove again and again, our brain constructs the world around us. It paints in the details that we do not see. It assumes, invents, hides, alters, and ignores vast swathes of the world around us. The “McGurk effect” is a mind-blowing auditory illusion—and you can listen to it HERE.

13. We took a cup of kindness with old friends for auld lang syne. We got down on the dance floor like a Times Square ball drop HERE. 

_______Thirteen Thursday