Loose Leaf Notes

1. The older I get, the more I talk aloud to myself, but it recently occurred to me that the older I get the more loved ones I have that have passed on, so maybe I’m talking to them.

2. “I’m not an atheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books.” -Einstein

3. The tomb is a womb / I know I’ll return to / I’ll scratch poetry on the walls / like a cave-dweller marks / the maze of humanity’s story. -Read Anxiety in its entirety HERE.

4. Joe and I are going to an immersion art show of Van Gogh in Charlotte NC this week. After buying our tickets online, I received an update with the heading “Know Before You Gogh.”

5. Excerpt from my favorite poem of late that I wish I wrote:  true story i have no use for politicians, but that’s not true / sometimes i run out of toilet paper / true story i’m not running for mayor of truthtown, i’m not managing / a health food store, i don’t sleep inside a fortune cookie / true story i see two moons tonight / one in the sky and one in the lake / and drunk enough to swim for it…” And his blog is called a Poetry Yard Sale. I love that!

6. I think it’s funny when I call the TV remote “the flipper” as if I was playing pinball.

7. “The best gift I got was the word “disarray,” spoken on the phone by a niece in L.A. Somehow I had misplaced that word in favor of “chaos,” “mess,” “clutter,” “shambles,” but “disarray” is so elegant, it sounds French, like the name Desirée, an improvement over “clutter,” which makes confusion sound trashy. My niece agreed. “It’s what I do,” she said, “I bring glamor to confusion.” Garrison Keillor

8. Joe went backpacking last weekend in Grayson Highlands State Park and up to the Mount Rogers summit (5,729 feet), where wild ponies roam. The first night it rained and he slept in an Appalachian Trail Shelter with a couple that had hiked the whole AT (piecemeal) in one season with their young family. The youngest was 4 and has broken the record for the youngest person to complete the 2,193-mile hike, which was picked up by the Associated Press.  See HERE.

9. So that was in 2020 and since then the mom had a baby and they decided to celebrate (and break the new future hiker in) with a one night hike.

10. “As per tradition of Appalachian Trail thru-hikers, the kids all took on trail names early in the trip. Juniper was given the name ‘The Beast’ and Addison became known as ‘Angel Wings’, while Zane was ‘Boomerang’ and Lyol took on the name ‘Blaze’. (Danae and Olen were mostly known as ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad’ on the trail, but they eventually took the names ‘Queen Bee’ and ‘Lion King’).”

11. They gave Joe his trail name of “Waldorf” because he talked to them about Rudolf Steiner’s Waldorf education.

12. “Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.” – Gary Snyder

13. “An old idea suggests that when we can’t find our way to the deep truths of life in a positive manner, then the deep truths may surface in more painful ways. I’m not wishing the virus on anyone, not wishing that the virus be present in any form at all. I am saying that the message about the interconnection of all of life is so important at this time on earth that it may reach us in more dangerous and painful ways. It’s as if the immune system of the body of humanity has been worn down by all the conflicts and oppression in the world, and been further worn out by intense anxieties and fears being driven by the growing climate emergency, by intensifying political upheavals and by the collapse of protecting institutions. In the midst of all the turmoil the global pandemic painfully shows us through daily counts and troubling charts that we all affect each other; that what happens to one person can actually come to affect and even infect everyone else. At the same time that we must practice “social distancing,” we can also see more clearly how we are all interconnected…” Michael Meade. More HERE.

____________Thirteen Thursday