Loose Leaf Notes

1. I’m not a leader, but I’m not a follower either. I’m a party of one.

2. While on our Floyd Family Soft Open Take-over of The Old Marshall Jail Hotel  in NC (which is going to be a hard act to follow), my friend Jody told me that she dreamt I was speaking emotionally and in poetry to her and then I said, “I’m so glad I am the person I need me to be.”

3. On our way into the jail hotel, someone on the street shouted, “Watch out, they let you in but won’t let you out!”

4. The sign in front of my daughter-in-law’s Carolina Flowers Mercantile read “Hey, We Lilac You.”

5. OMG with a J! That’s how I reacted to the Old Marshall Jail Art Hotel that my son and his wife created.  See HERE. 

6.  On the last day of our stay in Marshall, we went to Asheville’s (20 minutes away) River Arts District where Josh manages ClaySpace, a working clay studio coop and gallery. After having a beer at The Wedge brewery, we visited the Foundation Walls, a street art project where artists are encouraged to paint graffiti and murals. It went on for blocks and was like another world.

7. I did my first interview in the rain.  I went for a story on a new Outdoor School (Forest School) in Floyd and it was raining. The teacher said they don’t refer to rain as bad weather and that rain just means more worms to study. See HERE.

8. “A year of quarantine with your spouse is something we didn’t anticipate when we said our vows. I promised to have and to hold, in sickness and in health, but by “sickness,” I was thinking of a bad cold, maybe a sprained ankle, not a year of incarceration. But by God, quarantine is an excellent test of a marriage, and either you go to a hotel and call your lawyer or you discover that you married the exact right person, which, as I contemplate it day after day, seems to me to be the greatest good luck, right up there with being an all-star third baseman or winning the Nobel Peace Prize.” -Garrison Keillor

9. Now Billie Eilish looks like Marilyn Monroe or Madonna on the cover of Vouge HERE.

10. OMG! With a J! Old Marshall Jail photo album is HERE.

11. I followed the muse into town today. It came in the form of a pink pick-up truck with a license plate that said “FARM USE,” but I read it as “FAR MUSE.” -From a flashback post from my earliest days blogging, titled “Follow the Muse.” 

12. “When we come across a poem—any poem—our first assumption should not be to prejudice it as a thing of beauty, but simply as a thing. The linguists and theorists tells us that language is all metaphor in the first place. The word “apple” has no inherent link with that bright red, edible object on my desk right now. But the intricacies of signifiers and signifieds fade from view after college. Because of its special status—set apart in a magazine or a book, all that white space pressing upon it—a poem still has the ability to surprise, if only for a moment which is outside all the real and virtual, the aural and digital chatter that envelopes it, and us…” – From What is a Poem, The Atlantic

13. “Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.” – Lao Tzu

____________Thirteen Thursday