Loose Leaf Notes

1. Driving down to Roanoke in the rainy fog this weekend, the Bradford Pear trees in bloom looked like February snow.

2. THIS is what I did in Roanoke.

3. My favorite birdsong is wood thrush and cat bird. Click HERE to hear your favorite birdsong.

4. “I wouldn’t be surprised if poetry—poetry in the broadest sense, in the sense of a world filled with metaphor, rhyme, and recurring patterns, shapes, and designs—is how the world works. The world isn’t logical, it’s a song.” -David Byrne

5. Poetry Séance: Don’t give up the ghost / Just lower the lights / Invite poetry to visit / like a voice from the distance / Wait for the right words to rise…

6. The Pale Blue Dot- By: Carl Sagan – “We succeeded in taking that picture from deep space, and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam…

7. “…Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

8. LOVE at the Christiansburg Aquatic Center.

9. LOVE mural in downtown Floyd

10. I call this picture “Love at First Stripe.”

11. For a long time when Joe and I first got together I couldn’t say “I love you” because it sounded so perfunctory, but I did say, “I am so loving you.”

12. I love that I got a 7-word bingo on my first Scrabble play this week.  The word was “eclipse,” which reminded me that I saw the solar eclipse in August 2017 while on a boat with my sister and brother-in-law and as we were watching a boat name “Eclipse” went by. It’s also the name of one of my newest poems HERE. 

13. Have you ever noticed that LOVE, SOLVES, EVOLVE, REVOLVE, and RESOLVE are basically variations of the same word, as if there is a grand agreement that love solves and evolves us?

___________Thirteen Thursday