Loose Leaf Notes

1. “Light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make it beautiful.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

2. Reading the Tarot / of its leafy spread / Autumn is the Tower / of disruptive change.

3. Apparently, my poetry book, Packing a Suitcase for the Afterlife, is for sale at Walmart.  I don’t know how something like that happens.

4. It Might Be Lovely on the Other Side – “Walking through life into death. Billy Connolly has lost a lot of people close to him in recent years, including his manager Steve Brown and various actor friends, including Sean Connery and Robin Williams. When his sister Florence died six years ago, Connolly tells me, he experienced an unsettling season of paranoia. “She used to beat people up at school who were picking on me. She ended up being a school teacher. When Flo died I got an irrational terror that I was gonna be picked on again. A wave would come over me, that I was unsafe, that I was exposed. Then it would go away again.” Years earlier he had been unable to visit either his father or his mother on their deathbeds, despite, in both cases, getting all the way to the hospital car park. The mixture of sadness, love, resentment and pity was always too much.” More HERE.

5. Creativity is essentially playing with what fascinates us. It’s looking at something ordinary and seeing it in a whole new way. Artists, writers, humans—you know, all of us— have the capacity to do this, to translate the mundane into the poetic, to assign vibrant new meaning to what is so familiar to us that it’s become practically invisible. As the composer John Cage, said, “I am trying to be unfamiliar with what I’m doing.” Therein lies the secret.” – Sue Monk Kidd

6. I like to rhyme / but not on cue / I like a relationship of lines / that are interchangeable / Poems like make-up / no one knows you’re wearing / Aged like wine and honey / poured from the psyche – Read A Poem That Looks Good for Its Age in its entirety HERE. 

7. I heard that our Floyd girl Morgan Wade is being considered for a Grammy. But Morgan, I thought I was your Grammy (or one of them).

8.  THIS man was stunned to find his Chevrolet Avalanche brimming with black walnuts. They were all over the engine bay, including behind the radiator and around the battery, and dozens were hidden in and under the body panels. Turns out, a squirrel had spent several days carrying them from a tree in his yard to the truck-turned-buffet, where it hoped to live and feast during the winter months. There were about 42 gallons (or about 150 pounds) of walnuts, a number that’s even more impressive when you consider the squirrel likely brought them in one at a time..

9. Didn’t Eminem make a movie called 8 MILE? That’s how many miles I rode on my bike this weekend. See HERE.

10. If someone asks me why I don’t meditate anymore, I will say ‘because I do Thirteen Thursday.’ It’s a practice.

11. I was on my way to the Chamber Spooktacular Halloween Party dressed as a cross between a skeleton and a devil, when I thought to myself  ‘now that I’m getting older, I can really pull off a scary costume.’

12. Neuroscientist argues that the left side of our brains have taken over our minds – “We behave like people who have right hemisphere damage. The left hemisphere’s goal is to enable us to manipulate things, whereas the goal of the right hemisphere is to relate to things and understand them as a whole… Einstein said that the rational mind is a faithful servant, but the intuitive mind is a precious gift, and we live in a world that has honored the servant but has forgotten the gift…” “A way of thinking which is reductive, mechanistic has taken us over,” said McGilchrist in The Divided Brain. “We behave like people who have right hemisphere damage. We treat the world as a simple resource to be exploited. It’s made us enormously powerful. It’s enabled us to become wealthy, but it’s also meant that we’ve lost the means to understand the world, to make sense of it, to feel satisfaction and fulfilment through our place in the world.”

13. Billy Connolly: “He mostly enjoyed dictating his memoirs over the past year, Connolly says, and little wonder: “Looking at it all from a distance, when you’re comfortable, when you don’t have any of the younger person’s horrors for your aspirations – it all feels behind you, in a good way. You’re a successful guy. You live in Key West. You’re telling the whole story.”

____________Thirteen Thursday