Loose Leaf Notes

1. Favorite summer activity: taking picture of butterflies in my yard and eating the berry pie that Joe carried through airports and on planes for me, all the way from Seattle.

2. While in Seattle, teaching a teen meditation retreat, he saw THIS amazing art show of a Nashville artist who makes elaborate art out of lottery tickets. What a winner!

3. I just learned the word cant. It means slant, which makes me wonder if we can call “slant rhyme” “cant rhyme,” or would that be too defeatist?

4. We just lost another Floyd icon at an age you wouldn’t expect. A’Court, a musician, artist and butterfly mystic recluse, is the subject of THIS recent poem, which begins : Every death is a pearl / in a rosary of prayer / And tonight you are the moon / smiling at the center.

5. It wasn’t your typical interview. Nothing with A’Court ever is. It wasn’t really an interview at all, but I did sit down with him after the meet-the-artist traffic slowed down. I asked about the apostrophe in his first name and the thought behind wearing tiger ears to the opening. ~ Read more about A’Court’s last art exhibit opening HERE.

6. After that opening I had to go back into my blog and put the apostrophe everywhere I had typed his name and wrongly not used it.

7. I’m so happy that the solar panels that Ronald Regan took down are finally going back up on the White House. This is what environmentalist Bill McKibben had to say about it, “Better late than never – in truth, no one should ever have taken down the panels Jimmy Carter put on the roof way back in 1979. But it’s very good to know that once again the country’s most powerful address will be drawing some of that power from the sun.”

8. My favorite brainstorm picture HERE.

9.  A funny thing happened on the way to the chicken coop in the back of the fenced-in garden. The garden is so overgrown that I have to walk through a maze of an obstacle course to get there.

10. A blog title I have written down but haven’t used yet: The Kaboom of Bloom.

11. When it comes to writing, endings should look like they’ve always been there, as though there were no possible other conclusion, but the problem with an ending is that you don’t know what it is until you get there. You hope you’ll know it when you see it. Some endings do come without effort, and you just take down what is happening. But others you have to find. Sometimes a false ending presents itself. You think the story or poem is over, but it’s not. And then there are the series of small endings, conclusions to each line or paragraph that you have to figure out.

12. Funny, I have a thing about going first and am often first at the Thirteen Thursday headquarters sign-up.  At my woman’s dialogue I often go first, in part because if I don’t speak up when the spirit strikes me I will forget what I wanted to say. Another reason is that I want to get it over with so I can just relax and listen.

13. Don’t expect the mirror to smile first.  ~ A’Court Bason