Loose Leaf Notes

1. The words ‘when bras were white’ recently came as a first line of a poem that I had no idea how to finish. Another line came when I was at the Little River Poetry Festival and was looking at my hand while holding a pen and thought ‘I should be buried with a pen in my hand.’

2. We buried my dad with a lottery ticket in his casket because we couldn’t find his TV remote.

3. Seen recently on a blog: “The ordinary is worth cultivating, I figure. There’s so much of it.”

4. All the poems I’ve written over the years were steps to get to the one below.

5. Funny how when you forget what you what you were going to do you can go back to the place where you first thought of it and most of the time the memory comes back.

6. Reading or weeding? As long as it’s not cleaning the kitchen. Again.

7. “The way you love someone, and how you talk. Your smile and your personality. What you believe in, and all your dreams. The way you drink your tea. How you decorate your home. Or party. Your grocery list. The food you make. How your writing looks. And the way you feel. Life is art.” – Helena Bonham Carter

8. You add your own words / to the sum of parts / Distinct as fingerprints / A poet’s north star / You write it down / and read it out loud / Your thoughts are the medium / and your voice is your art.  More HERE 

9. I don’t know where it comes from or what makes it start. Sometimes I start receiving dictation while I’m working on something else. It’s like watching a TV show and the newscaster breaks in with a message. I grab a pen and write it down. I don’t have to know what it means. It’s not the time to fuss about where it will be used or to complain about the lack of wages it will earn. I know who my boss is. I do my grunt work. Write it all down on anything I can find. Some writing starts in a notebook and ends on the side of a popcorn box scribbled in a dark theater. – From The Voices in My Head, a blog post from 2007 HERE.

10. “The Vital Importance of Human Touch: It has been found that touch calms our nervous center and slows down our heartbeat. Human touch also lowers blood pressure as well as cortisol, our stress hormone. It also triggers the release of oxytocin, a hormone known for promoting emotional bonding to others. Psychology Today… The research demonstrating the need for human touch is vast. From a developmental standpoint, infants literally cannot survive without human touch. Skin-to-skin contact in even in the first hour after birth has been shown to help regulate newborns’ temperature, heart rate, and breathing, and decreases crying…” -Psychology Today

11. “I pity the paranoid Second Amendment crowd with the AR-15s in the front hall closet so they can defend themselves against leftist public school teachers coming to inject them with critical race theory vaccine or false-flag Girl Scouts selling cookies that contain transgender virus. It’s a miserable life, shades drawn, meeting fellow lunatics in secret websites, aware that the FBI has tapped your phone and is sending info to George Soros. The rest of us enjoy a picnic among the rhododendrons and mountain laurel, no pistols in our picnic baskets, no ammo belt under our T-shirt, and we feel more attached to our cellphones than to our weaponry. Life is good in this beautiful country that God has blessed, and the paranoids in our midst are missing out on all the best stuff. The shooting range is a grim place compared to a ball game…” Garrison Keillor

12. The pioneers have left / for the uncharted New World / They fell off the horizon / when the world was flat / When I was 3rd of nine / in an unbroken family line / before survival was optional / and paradise was a gamble / we had already won … Read Setting Sail in its entirety HERE.

13. “Life goes on, great plans crash on the rocks, there is no such thing as 24-hour dry cleaning so get over it, that dog won’t hunt, and the printer prints gibberish and you ask Alexa for Chopin and she thinks you’re going shopping, and yet — last night, sitting holding my love’s hand, the phone rang and it was an old friend I hadn’t spoken to in ages and nothing has changed, we talk and it’s music. If I drove up there tomorrow, I’d be welcome. This and her and a cup of ginger tea and a novel in progress are all this man requires. That and six glasses of water and regular flossing.” Garrison Keillor ____________Thirteen Thursday