Loose Leaf Notes

1. I’m pushing the year to a close, rushing to turn the calendar’s page, to clean the slate and start afresh, to meet the inevitable unknown.

2. I wonder if my line, ‘I don’t ever want an avatar’ will go the same way as ‘I don’t ever want an answering machine,’ which I didn’t want until someone gave me one.

3. “I made a New Year’s Resolution, decades ago, to make no more New Year’s Resolutions. It is the only resolution that I never broke.” -Seen on Facebook

4. NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTION by Fred LaMotte: “Don’t go, just arrive. Rest the mind in the heart. Dissolve your pronouns in ‘Thou.’ Talk to the animals. Smile for no reason at 3 A.M. Instead of asking, “what have I attained?” let everything around you become exceedingly awake, raindrop, silence, stars. Discover the secret treasure in the place where you already are by not searching. Breath happens. Just arrive.”

5. Some days are like this.

6. Joe wonders how I get lost in cities, have no sense of direction and am anxious about highway overpasses and exits, but can find my way around a scrabble board, see the all the openings, fit multiple words in small spaces and sort out the letters to make something valuable when it just looks like a jumble of letters to him.

7. I knew I was meant to be a poet when I heard Leonard Cohen sing Suzanne and when I read Leo Lionni’s children’s book about a field mouse named Fredrick who didn’t save nuts and work to prepare for winter like the other mice. He saved colors and words and then saved the day by reciting poems when it was cold and the food ran out.

8. I lean towards Taoism and Wu Wei, “the practice Taoism of letting one’s action follow the simple and spontaneous course of nature rather than interfering with the harmonious working of universal law by imposing arbitrary and artificial forms.” –  Merriam-Webster

9. I also lean towards the Wise Woman Tradition and Susun Weed’s six steps of healing, the first of which is “do nothing,” followed by Collect information, Engage the energy, nourish and tonify before stimulate and sedate, use drugs or break and enter.

10. “The Dali Lama says you can only begin a real meditation on life with a meditation on death. Gothic stuff but something in it. Finiteness and infiniteness are the two poles of the human experience. Everything we do, think, feel, imagine, discuss is framed by the notion of whether our death is the end or the beginning of something else.” Bono

11. “Going home / Without my sorrow / Going home / Sometime tomorrow / To where it’s better / Than before / Going home / Without my burden / Going home / Behind the curtain / Going home / Without the costume / That I wore…” From Going Home by Leonard Cohen

12. “Bah” is not “fah“ – “As philosophers have suspected, and neuroscientists prove again and again, our brain constructs the world around us. It paints in the details that we do not see. It assumes, invents, hides, alters, and ignores vast swathes of the world around us. The “McGurk effect” is a mind-blowing auditory illusion—and you can listen to it HERE.

13. We took a cup of kindness with old friends for auld lang syne. We got down on the dance floor like a Times Square ball drop HERE. 

_______Thirteen Thursday