Loose Leaf Notes

1. My philosophy can be boiled down to: There’s more going on than what we can see.

2. 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 – Read Bardo in its entirety HERE.

3. Filibuster of filibluster?

4. The secret to a long life? That’s what I asked our local centenarian who I interviewed last week.  She said, “Just be a sincere person, genuine.”  Story coming soon …

5. A few days after I interviewed our local centenarian, we buried a young family member of only 21 who lost her battle with drug addiction.

6. Juxtaposed with this: “This is what a baby shower during Covid in February looks like,” said Rowan Chantal’s mom near the end of Rowan and Kaitlin Chantal’s two-hour Drive-by Baby Shower. The couple is expecting their first baby, a son named Allister Ray, any day now. – From My Floyd Press story “Oh, Baby! Local Couple Hosts Drive-by Baby Shower” HERE. 

7. “Late-Stage Pandemic Is Messing With Your Brain -We have been doing this so long, we’re forgetting how to be normal… “We’re all walking around with some mild cognitive impairment,” said Mike Yassa, a neuroscientist at UC Irvine. “Based on everything we know about the brain, two of the things that are really good for it are physical activity and novelty. A thing that’s very bad for it is chronic and perpetual stress.” Living through a pandemic—even for those who are doing so in relative comfort— “is exposing people to microdoses of unpredictable stress all the time,” said Franklin, whose research has shown that stress changes the brain regions that control executive function, learning, and memory. That stress doesn’t necessarily feel like a panic attack or a bender or a sleepless night, though of course it can. Sometimes it feels like nothing at all. “It’s like a heaviness, like you’re waking up to more of the same, and it’s never going to change.” – More HERE.

8. “Where would we be without Google? We’d be at the library, wasting our lives searching through reference books in the basement, looking up odd facts. I googled, “Where would we be without Google?” the other day and in 39/100ths of a second Google located 4,530,000,000 results. If I spent one minute examining each result, it would take me thousands of years. So there’s your answer. Thanks to Google, we get enough information to kill us many times over. In the old days, we experienced the world directly through sight, sound, touch, and personal memory, and now we look for it in a computer…” Garrison Keillor

9. I only have a window of opportunity when poetry breezes through. It’s like watching the clouds and seeing pictures in them, but if I look away for a minute, they’re changed beyond recognition or gone.

10. The window has been a lifeline to me over the years as a homebody who struggles with chronic fatigue.  As a poet who needs regular inner reflection, I use it for perspective and inspiration.  I absolutely need to see the sky, the trees and the birds.  It’s maybe the one thing in life I couldn’t live without.

11. “I can’t stop noticing all the things I’m forgetting. Sometimes I grasp at a word or a name. Sometimes I walk into the kitchen and find myself bewildered as to why I am there… I’ve started keeping a list of questions, remnants of a past life that I now need a beat or two to remember, if I can remember at all: What time do parties end? How tall is my boss? What does a bar smell like? Are babies heavy? Does my dentist have a mustache? On what street was the good sandwich place near work, the one that toasted its bread? How much does a movie popcorn cost? What do people talk about when they don’t have a global disaster to talk about all the time? You have to wear high heels the whole night?” – From Late-Stage Pandemic Is Messing With Your Brain, The Atlantic

12. “In bereavement, we come to appreciate at the deepest, most felt level exactly what it means to die while we are still alive. The Tibetan term bardo, or “intermediate state,” is not just a reference to the afterlife. It also refers more generally to these moments when gaps appear, interrupting the continuity that we otherwise project onto our lives…There are times like these in our lives—such as facing death or even giving birth—when we are no longer able to manage our outer image, no longer able to suspend ourselves in pursuit of the ideal self… When things fall apart, we can only be as we are. Pretense and striving fall away, and life becomes starkly simple. The value of such moments is this: we are shown that the game can be given up and that when it is, the emptiness that we feared, emptiness of the void, is not what is there. What is there is the bare fact of being. Simple presence remains—breathing in and out, waking up and going to sleep. The inevitability of the circumstances at hand is compelling enough that for the moment, our complexity ceases. Our compulsive manufacturing of contrived existence stops…” Pema Khandro Rinpoche

13: “Tell the truth, or someone will tell it for you.” -Stephanie Klein

_______Thirteen Thursday