Loose Leaf Notes

1. Every day is a live cold open. You’re on the air.

2. I’ve never been able to balance my check book. I just keep extra money in my account so my checks won’t bounce.

3. During my flower child days, it was hip to say ‘let’s bounce” when we were leaving a place. Sometimes we’d say ‘let’s slide.’

4. It all comes down to / which flowers are in bloom / the size of the moon / and what to make for lunch / to what dreams you remember / and which ones you write down / to pens that click – on and off / and doors that don’t have to be locked  – Read Simple Life in its entirety HERE. 

5. Joe zooms at home for work and talks online for most of the day. He has a hard time sitting at the computer. I can sit pretty well, but it’s all the talking that would drive me crazy.

6. Joe would like to spend more time in the woods. I’d rather be in an art museum.

7. Easter Chicks or Spring Chickens?

8. Last year we were planning to go to D.C. for the cherry blossom bloom but had to cancel because of COVID. This year we missed it again because Joe was visiting his mom for her 92nd birthday.  I guess forsythia and daffodils will have to do.

9. Hello Yello

10. “Spring arrives in time to forgive us our debts. It’s spring, the air is brisk, the forsythia is blooming, there’s widespread amiability afoot, and walking through Central Park you feel you could pull twenty pedestrians out of the flow and rehearse them in “New York, New York, it’s a heck of a town, the Bronx is up and the Battery’s down, the people ride in a hole in the ground.” Winter tried to hang on, like a loud drunk at closing time who staggers around and takes a swing at you but eventually you heave him into a cab and it’s spring. “All the merry little birds are flying in the floating in the very spirits singing in are winging in the blossoming,” as E.E. Cummings down on 10th Street & Greenwich Avenue wrote. “And viva, sweet love.”- Garrison Keillor

11. “Japan just recorded its earliest cherry blossom bloom in 1,200 years. Scientists warn it’s a symptom of the larger climate crisis – A researcher at Osaka Prefecture University, has gathered records from Kyoto back to 812 AD from historical documents and diaries. In the central city of Kyoto, cherry blossoms peaked on March 26, the earliest in more than 1,200 years.” – CNN

12. My practice is navigating the Bardo, a Tibetan term for the intermediate state when something interrupts your normal sense of certainty and your old sense of reality isn’t available to you.

13. “The value of such a state is that 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

________Thirteen Thursday