Loose Leaf Notes

1. My nephew recently announced the birth of his new baby boy in a family email, saying: His name is Franklin Daniel Redman (FDR). The New Deal is here.

2. With all the new age affirmations and self-health practices floating around, I think it’s interesting that the theme to my latest dance practice song is “If she wants to roll she rolls. If she wants to stay, she stays. If she wants to go, she goes.” You can listen HERE.

3. “I have friends who go to church or sit at the Zen center. I respect that. The ritual of writing fills that need for me. Writing has been a kind of spiritual devotion for me. Listening to language, feeling stories unfold and poems arrive, being present to the page – I do not think of it as a career. I think of it as a devotion.” Naomi Shihab Nye

4. So much of life is about finding the balance between “whatever floats your boat” and “we’re all in the same boat.”

6. Author/storyteller Michael Meade describes the modern world as one with lots of information, some knowledge and very little wisdom, which leads me to say, “We better wise up.”

7. “When a person acts from their deep self it is automatically beneficial to the people around them. You don’t have to worry so much about saving the world. If you happen to become yourself, you’re contributing to the changing of the world.” Michael Meade, from The Light in the Dark Times audio.

8. It’s a whole new world when kids like my four-year-old grandson Bryce play “shoot the bad guys” games and when they get shot, they play dead for a few minutes and then get up and announce, “I restarted myself.”

9. I think consciousness is like water poured into a cup that we’re shaped by and identify with. At death, the water pours out of the cup. I don’t know where it goes, but I imagine it can travel, seep, join a larger body of water, collect or evaporate.

8. Yesterday I reminded Bryce of the song I sang to him when he was a baby: Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream, merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, Bryce is but a dream. He smiled and said, “I still like that.”

9. On the other hand, the song I sang to Bryce’s little brother Liam is the rock song Born to be Wild! Watch HERE

10. After Christmas I was so tired that I developed an opera yawn. I must still be tired because today my yawn sounded like Tarzan.

11. I think THIS statue would be more interesting if the pigeons were actually part of the sculpture.

12. “Poetry helps us imagine one another’s lives. It gives us intimate insights into someone else’s experience. To be able to have that kind of insight in 30 seconds or three minutes is a very precious kind of transmission. It’s not cluttered with a lot of extraneous, explanatory matter or the kind of chatter that comes so easily on the news these days. We’re surrounded by talk and language and reported and stories of a certain kind, the “breaking news” kind, but I think we hunger for another kind of story, the story that helps us just feel connected with on another, be with one another.” Naomi Shihab Nye

13. My latest fashion statement: a brightly colored pen tucked behind my ear.

Thirteen Thursday