Loose Leaf Notes

1. Yes, we’ve been watching the Monty Python documentary on Netflix.

2. And with episodes in 6 parts, it really is the Full Monty.

3. Just when I think nothing is happening, something does.

4. Like venison cooking lessons with my 14-year-old grandson who shot his first deer this year.

5. I love to look at pictures that involve the Droste effect, which is something like a never-ending fractal. When I was a kid, we had a book with a picture of a woman holding a book with a picture of her holding a book on the cover, and so on, that I studied and wondered how far it went.

6. “The “Droste effect,” is named after a 1904 package of Droste brand cocoa. The mathematical interest in these packaging illustrations is their implied infinity. If the resolution of the printing process—(and the determination and eyesight of the illustrator)—were not limiting factors, it would go on forever. A package within a package within a package… Like Russian dolls.” Wikipedia

7. I’m a member.

8. This is my practice: “The mystic Thomas a Kempis said that when you go out into the world, you return having lost some of yourself. Until you learn to inhabit your aloneness, the lonely distraction and noise of society will seduce you into false belonging, with which you will only become empty and weary. When you face your aloneness, something begins to happen. Gradually, the sense of bleakness changes into a sense of true belonging. This is a slow and open-ended transition but it is utterly vital in order to come into rhythm with your own individuality. In a sense this is the endless task of finding your true home within your life. It is not narcissistic, for as soon as you rest in the house of your own heart, doors and windows begin to open outwards to the world. No longer on the run from your aloneness, your connections with others become real and creative. You no longer need to covertly scrape affirmation from others or from projects outside yourself. This is slow work; it takes years to bring your mind home.” John O’Donohue

9. The sun was her psychedelic of choice / The ocean her love language / Her childhood heroes were Annie Oakley and Peter Pan / A camera was the first thing she bought / after getting paid for her first job at a daycare… Read The Eulogy in its entirety HERE. 

10. “I woke to the sound of nurses by my bed, discussing their Christmas plans. I thought I was talking to them, but they didn’t reply. I was aware of an existence, a me within my body. Had I disappeared?” Those are the words of Lotje Sodderland, the video diarist who suffered a traumatic brain injury from a stroke and is the subject of the Netflix documentary My Beautiful Broken Brain.

12. She also said this about her state following the brain injury: “It’s a heightened sense of reality. Euphoric. I can experience colors and sounds like I wasn’t able to before. So intensified. So exaggerated. Time has a new meaning. It’s all elongated and transient…  Recovery is learning to live a new life, and so in that way it is a re-birth and you realize that recovery is a chance to recreate your life and it’s a chance to kind of, make your song, your personality, the way you want it to be. . .The more hope I have about how things will get better, the more I recover.”

13. I learned that writing and reading are based in entirely different parts of the brain, meaning Lotje could learn to write again, but she couldn’t read what she had written.  She also said to deal with what the brain couldn’t do she had to focus on what matters, which often wasn’t reading or writing.

________Thirteen Thursday