Loose Leaf Notes

The following first appeared in the September 21st issue of The Floyd Press – The Grand Opening of the Floyd Democrats Campaign Office, located at 115 West Main Street, drew a crowd of supporters Friday afternoon.

It included an open house tour, a meet-and-greet and ribbon cutting with U.S. Senator Tim Kaine, who is up for re-election in 2024.

Floyd County resident Patty Quesenberry, a Democratic candidate for Virginia House of Delegates of District 47, and her daughter Renie Gates, who is running as a Democrat for Virginia Senate District 7, were both in attendance.

The longtime Floyd rescue squad volunteers will be on the ballot this November 7th in all Floyd County voting districts and beyond.

A dedication naming of the building, “The Hopkins Center,” preceded the ribbon cutting and was named for John Hopkins, a former chairperson of the Floyd Democrats who regularly staffs the campaign office.

 A potluck reception at the Hotel Floyd Conference Center followed the open house event and was attended by approximately 75 Democrat supporters.

Kamala Bauers introduced Senator Kaine at the reception, noting his long record of service and referring to him as “the most ethical person in office right now.” Kaine spoke informally and also laid out how much is at stake in upcoming elections.

“What would Republican control of both houses and a Republican governor mean? Right now, the Republican Senate is shutting down military promotions and the Republican House is cheerleading to shut down the government. That’s the Republican party right now.”

Kaine noted that bills have passed in Republican-led House and were blocked in the Democrat-led Senate that would roll back women making their own reproductive healthcare decisions, early voting, common sense gun safety measures, minimum wage and clean energy initiatives. “Republicans have gotten in line behind a person who has demonstrated that he doesn’t have the character to represent the best of who America is,” Kaine said.

“We’re the ones battling for democracy,” Kaine said to crowd applause. “We are living under a stress test of democracy, and we are surviving but not yet passing. Because of you and the work we’re going to do, we’re going to pass,” he told the crowd.

Quesenberry and Gates both addressed the crowd. According to her comments and the Floyd Democrats webpage (floydvadems.org), Quesenberry’s platform focuses on the climate crisis, childcare, housing, infrastructure, mental health/substance abuse disorder, responsible gun ownership, women’s rights, campaign finance reform, and worker’s rights.

“My motto is the three C’s, caring, compassion and commitment,” Gates told the audience, urging attendees to get involved in the race. Her platform interests include gun safety, care for the elderly, agriculture and sustainability, women and family rights, veterans, affordable housing, substance abuse, and broadband access.

Senator Kaine toured two local innovative businesses while in the area, including SWVA Biochar, a Floyd-based business that produces highly absorbent, specially produced charcoal with a wide variety of environmentally positive applications.  – Visit floydvadems.org for more information. -Colleen Redman

Photos:  1. Citizens mull about the new Democrat Campaign Office waiting to greet Senator Tim Kaine. 2. Floyd Democrat volunteer/organizer Kamala Bauers is pictured (left) with Tim Kaine’s campaign manager Keren Dongo. 3. Senator Kaine poses with local Democrat Candidates Patty Quesenberry (left) and Renie Gates. 4. The crowd responds to Senator Kaine’s arrival. 5. Former Floyd Democrats chairperson John Hopkins is honored with a plaque stating the campaign office’s name, Hopkins Center, after him. Pictured are Kamala Bauers, TracyAnne Costello (background), Anne Holton (Senator Kaine’s wife), Kaine, John Hopkins and Rebecca Daly, volunteer/organizer.  6. The ribbon is cut. 7. The crowd reacts to the ribbon cutting with applause.  8. Inside the office headquarters, candidates and attendees mingle. Pictured center is Misty Dawn Vickers, candidate for House of Delegates district 40, Salem city and three Roanoke County districts. Floyd candidate for delegate Patty Quesenberry is also pictured (right). 9. Bauers welcomed the crowd at the reception, attended by approximately 75 people. Kaine, Quesenberry and Gates each spoke. A potluck feast followed.  10. Kaine addresses the crowd. 11. Renie Gates speaks.  12. A celebratory cake made by Slaughters supermarket was front and center. 13.  Pictured together on the Hotel Floyd patio are Democrat volunteer/organizers Rebecca Daly and John Hopkins, Anne Holton, Senator Kaine and Kamala Bauers, a Democrat volunteer organizer and Hotel Floyd co-owner. 14. This reporter (right), who comes from a family of metal fabricators and ironworkers, makes a new friend.

At home in the sky
It dims its shine
From a bold glow
A hint of hue
Reveals the pale dreamy cap
of an off-duty moon

______Colleen Redman / Poets and Storytellers United

1. Best headline this week: Scientists Found Ripples in Space and Time. And You Have to Buy Groceries.” -Atlantic

2. Hold on to your hat or fly by the seat of your pants?

3. “What would an economic system based not on gold, but on the golden rule look like?” -My Dharmacratic friend Will asks.

4. Will also says this: “I think a healthy, properly functioning cell in our bodies offers us an excellent blueprint for our own relationship with the larger world. As above, so below. As inside, so outside in this unfolding fractal universe of repeating forms. Smaller lives cooperate to make our bodies. We are similarly part of a larger life. That larger life showers us with blessings, just as our bodies nourish our cells. Just as a non cancerous cell works for the whole and not just for itself, so should we labor to serve each other and the Earth.”

5. My skin is a mirror / As above so below / A galaxy of light years / Revealing a cosmos / Moons and stars / Blemishes and freckles / Black holes and red suns / in new constellations… Read My Celestial Body in its entirety HERE.

6. Droste Effect or Fractal?  The Droste effect refers to the recurrence of a single image within itself. Basically, a smaller version that contains an even smaller version appears within the picture, and so on. A fractal is a persistent pattern that seems the same at every scale and repeats itself over time. There are many examples of fractals that we encounter in everyday life. This means that the basic patterns are the same at any scale. They are the same at large “macro” scales as at small “micro” scales. The large is revealed by, and grows out from, the small.

7. My friend Luke wears make-up. More from Floyd Yoga Jam 2023 HERE. 

8. The Grand Opening of the Floyd Democrats Campaign Office, located at 115 West Main Street, drew a crowd of supporters Friday afternoon. It included an open house tour, a meet-and-greet and ribbon cutting with U.S. Senator Tim Kaine, who is up for re-election in 2024…  A potluck reception at the Hotel Floyd Conference Center followed the open house event and was attended by approximately 75 Democrat supporters… – From a story I just wrote for The Floyd Press.

9. Tim Kaine’s twitter bio reads: Anne Holton’s husband, Dad of 3, Stone Irish, public servant, musician, civil rights lawyer, backpacker.

10. My first husband was an alien, in that he was born in England and had a green card.

11. One of my past bios: Colleen likes gingerbread more than brownies and documentaries more than biographical movies. When she hits the computer for a second time after breakfast, she likes to shout out “Phase two in which Doris gets her oats!”

12. It was the 4th annual Floyd Americana Fest, “a festival in the heart of Floyd, VA that celebrates our eclectic local music, art, and community” the festival’s Facebook page reads. Check out Scenes from the Floyd Americana Fest HERE. 

13. With a purple umbrella and a fifty cent hat… Watch HERE. More from Atlantic Beach HERE. 

_________Thirteen Thursday

It was the 4th annual Floyd Americana Fest, “a festival in the heart of Floyd, VA that celebrates our eclectic local music, art, and community” the festival’s Facebook page reads.

This year, the stages were spread throughout downtown.

I arrived in time to catch the Lamb Brothers playing Grateful Dead tunes at the Cocoa Mia venue stage.

It’s a sweet new outdoor venue and the trio’s vocal harmonies were also sweet.

Henry Hardt’s Mudcats were playing on the Outer Space stage when I passed by. I caught a couple of other bands there as the afternoon and evening went on because Outer Space is such a great place to hang-out.

Sure enough, there was impromptu bluegrass in the alley at the Floyd Country Store.

I stopped to admire the ceramic art of Betse Dunham on venders row. I love her work!

And visited with my Fit to Be Tied friends.

Of course, I made it to the main stage in the Lineberry Park for some dancing with my friends to Appalachian Space Train.

Could you be loved, Izzy Beasley?! Izzy is my friend from the Little River Poetry Festival who surprised me while we were dancing.

Caught in the act. Thanks Don Cox for capturing this one. I’m usually behind the camera.

I then headed over to the Dogtown Roadhouse for a beer break and a Seph Custer and the Flatbreaks set.

A group of us finished the festival dancing to our friend Ruth’s Time is Art band.  Oh, those little Hawkins boys. What dancers. We could barely keep up.   I don’t have a picture or video, but if you were there, you know what I mean!

And this is just a glimpse of what went on. I’m looking forward to next year! Thanks to the two Jakes, Jake Retting and Jake Rauer for organizing the event.

HERE is a story I wrote for The Floyd Press on the Americana Festival 2021. There is also a picture there of one of the dancing Hawkins boys!

My skin is a mirror
As above so below
A galaxy of light years
Revealing a cosmos

Moons and stars
Blemishes and freckles
Black holes and red suns
in new constellations

A timeless oracle
Marked by the past
Connecting the dots
of a body in orbit

Exposed to the elements
Held together by breath
A magic carpet carries the soul
From world to world
From word to gospel

_______Colleen Redman / Poets and Storytellers United/ dVerse Poets Pub

1. For four full days, we had front row seats hanging with the surfers and sandpipers on Atlantic Beach NC.

2. It was our fourth time vacationing on the south-facing barrier island where you can watch sunsets over the ocean.

3. We practically had the beach to ourselves. The days were warm and sunny, the ocean swimming was great but the sky was our main entertainment.

4. We never missed a sunset.

5. And Joe, who likes to do morning yoga on the beach, got some masterpiece shots of the sunrises.

6. On our last beach day a storm blew in.

7. It just made for more sky watching. When the rain finally did come, we took cover in a beach tiki bar where some of the patrons thought they spotted a tornado.

8. It didn’t take long for dark clouds to clear.

9. And we were back to watching the colors.

10. And rain brings rainbows.

11. A friendly sandpiper came to visit.

12. Dog walkers and photographers got back to their business.

13. And fishermen cast their lines and waited for a good catch.

____________Thirteen Thursday – Our 2021 Atlantic Beach vacation post is HERE. 

_______Wordless Wednesday

Read Quantum Physics theory
Underline the best parts
Find poems in lost places
Wear a leopard skin pillbox hat

Clear the dust
Keep a promise
Paint your toenails
Make a ‘not to do’ list

Go off script
Let go of a goal
Count your lucky stars
Hold on to your own

________Colleen Redman / Poets and Storytellers United / Remedy for Grief HERE / Remedy for Depression HERE. 

1. If you want to know me, read Fredrick the mouse by Leo Lionni.

2. I’m never going to have an avatar and am never going to wear stiletto heels.

3. I saw a woman at Floyd Yoga Jam who had two identical wide brim hats on, one on top of the other. I asked her why she had two hats and she answered that she “wears many hats.”

4. A few of the books I sold at Yoga Jam sold because people liked the title: Packing a Suitcase for the After Life.

5. The Priestess and the (Nutty) Professor. That’s the way I introduced my friend Katherine and myself at the Death Class Poetry Reading that we presented at Yoga Jam 2023. She  is a Life Passage Ceremonialist who leans towards the study of the spiritual masters, like the Dali Lama. I am more drawn to the work of master mythologist and Irish wise guy Michael Meade and to the study of Quantum Physics, which I refer to as the LSD of science because it blows my mind. We are both interested in psychology and consider our poetry as depth psychology meets death mythology… More HERE.

6. The theme of the Yoga Jam Festival this year was Tranceformation. I think the above picture of me, taken after receiving a massage in which my head was involved is a good accompaniment for that title.

7. Dance to Steve Winwood’s Higher Love / Rub a genie’s lamp / Buy postage stamps with tulips on them / Color in your doodles with highlighter pens… Read Remedy for Depression II in its entirety HERE.  

8. “What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously. A convention is a social convenience, as, for example, money … but it is absurd to take money too seriously, to confuse it with real wealth … In somewhat the same way, thoughts, ideas and words are “coins” for real things.” Alan Watts

9. I personally don’t do yoga. I was taking some photographs of a yoga class when I realized and said to myself, “I can’t follow directions.” And that is whether it be driving or following directions on how to move my body.

10. I lost my car keys at Yoga Jam, or so I thought. The backpack I was using for the weekend had too many pockets and hidden zippered compartments. I found the keys a day later in a pocket I didn’t know or remember was there.

11. Like a person who stutters doesn’t stutter when they sing, I am certifiably clumsy unless I’m dancing.

12. Watch a Yoga Jam Soul Train dance line HERE.  

13. “Dancing is not to get somewhere. Life is the same.”  Alan Watts

________Thirteen Thursday

That’s the way I introduced my friend Katherine and myself at the Death Class Poetry Reading that we presented at Yoga Jam 2023.

She  is a Life Passage Ceremonialist who leans towards the study of the spiritual masters, like the Dali Lama. I am more drawn to the work of master mythologist and Irish wise guy Michael Meade and to the study of Quantum Physics, which I refer to as the LSD of science because it blows my mind. We are both interested in psychology and consider our poetry as depth psychology meets death mythology.

I shared with the group of about 25 how Katherine and I have been close friends for more than 30 years, and how we knew each other before we knew each other, referring to the fact that we both had published articles in Mothering Magazine in the ‘70s and unknowingly worked at rival daycares in the same town in Massachusetts around the same time. In Floyd, since 1985, we raised our kids together (all boys who were all friends), attended women’s circles and created community via the Blue Mountain School, Women’s Wellness Week, celebrations and gatherings and more. And now we are sharing and blending our poetry memoirs together.

“What is a poetry memoir and how can I learn more about doing that?” someone asked. I think Katherine and I both wanted to leave our stories as a legacy to our children. As poets, poetry was an obvious medium. Our histories are sprinkled throughout our poetry that weaves together personal and universal themes, and even some humor and word play.

‘What is a Death Class?’ another attendee asked. I explained that my interest in death came when my brothers, Jim and Dan, died a month apart in 2001. It rocked my world and resulted in me writing a book, The Jim and Dan Stories, about growing up as 9 siblings, my brothers’ deaths and the grief process. Alan Forest, head of the counseling department at Radford University, read the book, made it part of his class curriculum on death and bereavement for counselors and asked me to be a guest speaker at the class, which I did for about four years before the book went out of print.

More recently, Alan, who is recently retired, learned that Katherine and I have been on a Soulful Aging Poetry Reading Tour, sharing our poetry in a call-and-response style, setting up readings and reading poems that delve into loss, grief, aging and death where we have been asked to. The Death Class Reading was born there in that RU class that Alan invited us to. Katherine and my topics overlap, and our styles and voices are different, which gives the readings a deepening and a multi-layered experience to listeners.

Every death is a big bang / that blows up our pretense / splits us like atoms in two / Wherever you go / a part of me follows / and I carry a part of you… When my brothers died, I was only 50 and not yet thinking about taking my own leave from this world, but since Kathrine and I have both broken the age barrier (hitting 70) our poetry reflects that as way to “apprentice to our own disappearance,” which is a fitting term coined by poet David Whyte. More recently, our Soulful Aging has morphed into exploring our developmental stage of life as Transcendence.

If you want to know me / Be still and go within/ To your own welcoming soul / We can meet there anytime / The more familiar it becomes / As you reside there / You will know/ All you need / to know me…   Katherine has written poignantly about the death of her sons’ father, her niece and close friends that she attended to and created memorial services for. She read from her new book Streaming from the Inside: Navigating Middle Elder (see my review HERE.)

Held in the Yoga Jam Tea Shanti Oasis, along the Greasy Creek, it was a good turnout with focused attention and shared discussion.

Our books are available for sale on Amazon. Just google our names, Katherine Chantal or Colleen Redman to find them.  HERE is an intro to my latest book Poems from the Darkroom.

Meet some of my dance friends dancing to the tunes of Justin Trawick @Yoga Jam.

The highlight of Saturday at Yoga Jam was finally getting Ryan Turman to dance with me.

Don’t forget to watch your carbon footprint, Ryan!

Even Ryan’s dad Mike (whose land the festival is held on) had some moves. That was a real coup!

The dancing went on in the field at the front stage with Jordan Harman and the Humble Brags (Floyd’s Allen brothers).

For me, it was a reunion of Floyd friends, past and present.

My friend Luke comes to dance to all the best dance bands.

Everyone got in on the act.

When I don’t get a video clip of a band I like, it usually means I was too busy dancing.

The Dancing went on into the night with a full field of dancers (watch the video clip below to see them).

Nightlife at Yoga Jam comes with a little fire and flash.

I rarely make it to the last of the late-night bands, even with some Green Room couch time in between, and I only get a small sampling of what goes on at Yoga Jam. Next up is some scenes from Bliss Land and the Tea Shanti Oasis where my friend Katherine and I did our Death Class Poetry Reading.

At the 12th annual Floyd Yoga Jam, life-passages officiant Katherine Chantal opened the festival with the traditional opening ceremony, bringing attendees together to set the sacred and joyful intent for the four-day festival of yoga, wellness workshops, music, dance, art, children’s activities and camping in the great outdoors. Watch HERE.

The Theme this year is Tranceformation.

The weather couldn’t be more perfect.

Part of the Opening Ceremony, included passing the Yoga Jam torch from Yoga Jam founder and 11-year director Shirley Ann Burgess to new owners Elaine Braley and Katie Turman. Katie is the daughter-in-law of the Turman family, whose have provided land and festival infrastructure, which is why we say ‘it’s all in the family.’  Back in 2005 Elaine owned a Salon and Day Spa, which I wrote about for The Floyd Press HERE.

The torch was actually water, taken from the Greasy Creek that runs along the Yoga Jam site. There was also some water in the variety of tears for this moving ritual.

Honoring the change of hands holding Yoga Jam was followed by Kirtan music and Dances of Universal Peace, shared by Bhaki Kulani, a Floyd County-based kirtan band.

“For over a decade Floyd Yoga Jam has brought a four-day music, yoga, dance, and art festival to Southwest Virginia. We offer an impressive variety of music from Kirtan to late-night DJs.  Four massive yoga tents offer around the clock classes and workshops.  Numerous food trucks, arts and crafts vendors, teachers and healers complete the Karma Culture community.  Held every Labor Day Weekend FYJ includes camping, yoga classes and a healing village located near a meandering creek, nestled in the Blue Ridges mountains, “ reads the festival’s website.

After the ceremony, we enjoyed some local Chantal artisan coffee.

Followed by food, libations, friendship and music at the Dance Hall Tent.

And of course some main stage dancing (Yam Yam).

Some of us attended Chakra Dance Yoga at the Brahma Nirvana tent with Kat Harman.

She led the yogis (watch for some familiar faces) in a Soul Train Dance Line, among other things.

There’s always time for hammock time along the creek.

And visiting friends who are vending their art.

I’m always up for some night life.

Especially if it involves a light show.

And this was just Thursday, the warm-up 1:00 opening.

The festival is in full swing with Friday, Saturday and Sunday still to go. Four day general passes are $200 but one day tickets are also available at the gate. Katherine Chantal and I will be reading poetry at the Yoga Jam Tea Shanti on Saturday at 1:45 and our books are available at the Merch Tent.

I have written extensively about Floyd Yoga Jam over the years. You can type in “Floyd Yoga Jam” on the sidebar to the right and see festival posts over the years. HERE is the first story that came out in 2012 in The Floyd Press.