Loose Leaf Notes

1. Give me a break or a smash hit?

2. I’m the kind of person who wishes they put crossword puzzle books in hotel rooms instead of bibles.

3. “Inside the word ’emergency’ is ’emerge’; from an emergency new things come forth. The old certainties are crumbling fast, but danger and possibility are sisters.” ―Rebecca Solnit

4. How Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is helping doctors understand long COVID  with Dr. Lucinda Bateman: “It’s a clinical diagnosis, it’s considered a post-viral syndrome… the presentation is defined by severely impaired function and inability to maintain activity without illness relapse. That’s called post-exertional malaise. And those are the hallmarks and symptoms of CFS, along with the core symptoms of cognitive impairment and disordered sleep, sometimes pain… More HERE.

5. Joe calls me a Sleep doula. I recently realized the amount of time I’ve spent rubbing backs to help others fall asleep, my sons when they were little, my grandsons and Joe, but as a long long hauler, I have disordered sleep myself (see above).

6. I hear you say, “lazy” / when you learn my secret ambition / is to find a couch and lie on it / My secret symptom of modern perversion / like Agent Orange or Gulf War Syndrome / IT’S ALL IN YOUR HEAD / Tell that to the babies with no limbs / to the vaccine injured kids / Tell that to the mercury in my mouth / or the hormone fed antibiotic filled mad cows… – excerpt of CFS Poem from the early 90s.

7. Break out, break down, break up or break through?

8. Tap or Pat?

9. It’s a trilogy! Coming Soon: Poems from the Dark Room, my third book of poems in a series is a retrieving and integration of coded memories, a proof of concept retrospective show, held to the light, poem by poem. It’s a poetry memoir and travelogue of aging that delves into personal and universal themes where depth psychology and death mythology meet.

10. It might have started when I was four-years old / when my father read The Snow Queen to me / He never finished the story / about a sister in search of her brother / Her red shoes floated down the river / I’ve been looking for them ever since / Vertigo is not an Alfred Hitchcock thriller / Not as bad as a glass shard lodged in your eye / It’s more like trying to stay warm in the cold / while searching for ways to describe snow… Read VERTIGO in its entirety HERE.

11. This was also the first year that I wasn’t covering the Halloween Costume Party and taking pictures for a photo spread for the local paper. So I was free to enter the costume party contest for the first time. We entered as a duo. I had to work on getting Joe to save his psychedelic bellbottoms for the party. He thinks they’ll make good yoga pants and might show up in them sometime soon at the grocery store… More from My KIND of Halloween HERE.

12. “The idea of God is an absolutely necessary psychological function of an irrational nature, which has nothing whatever to do with the question of God’s existence. The human intellect can never answer this question, still less give any proof of God. Moreover, such proof is superfluous, for the idea of an all-powerful divine Being is present everywhere, unconsciously if not consciously, because it is an archetype.” Carl Jung

13. “Pain that is not transformed is transferred.” ―Richard Rohr

___________Thirteen Thursday