Loose Leaf Notes

1. Apparently, I have a Facebook friend named Page Turner.

2. The rain literally puts a damper on things.

3. There’s been so much rain in the past couple of weeks that people on Facebook were posting songs like THIS and THIS.

4. Joe and I are currently are using a dental floss that is supposed to be mint flavored but we both think it tastes like pickles.

5. Posted by a Facebook Friend:  Donald Trump sounds like our drunk neighbor.

6. Danny Devito:  Bernie, You’re our only hope Obi-Wan Kanobi

7. Thinking about yet another school shooting, reminded me of Einstein saying that imagination is more important than knowledge.  Recent studies have shown that a child with imagination doesn’t resort to violence because they can imagine different solutions.

8. Before 500 BCE, religion and poetry was largely the same thing. People did not presume to be able to define the Mystery. They looked for words that could describe the mystery. Poetry doesn’t claim to be a perfect description as dogma foolishly does. It’s a “hint half guessed,” to use T. S. Eliot’s phrase. That’s why poetry seduces you and entices you into being a searcher for the Mystery yourself. It creates the heart leap, the gasp of breath, inspiring you to go further and deeper; you want to fill in the blanks for yourself.  -Richard Rohr

9. Imagination is developed in children through play and storytelling and thwarted by early computer gaming, TV watching and academic instruction.  Joseph Chilton Pierce says, “You can’t have real learning with a child unless they are playing. Real playing is how real learning takes place.  You can have conditioning and a Pavlovian conditioning of his dogs, or behaviors modifications through other means which we look on as very serious, and we generally call learning, but it’s not learning. It’s conditioning.”

10. Pierce also said:  The telling of the story challenges the brain to create entirely new routing every time. Every new story means that new neural connections must be made between all the fields involved in imagery and the sensory maps of the brain … Each new story demands a complete, new, re‑routing of the neural patterns themselves. It means the brain has to continually expand and expand its operations, auditory, visual, sensory fields, and all the rest of it, with each story … This builds the foundation for all forms of abstract, symbolic and metaphoric processing that visual stimulation bypasses altogether.

11. I don’t think this counts, but it’s the story my father used to tell us:  I’ll tell you a story of Jack in the Dory and now my story’s begun. I’ll tell you another of Jack and his brother and now my story is done.

12. You don’t need a weathervane to know which way it’s blowing in the wind.

13. My kind of kinky 50 Shades of Shadows and Date Night is HERE and HERE. 

__________Thirteen Thursday