Loose Leaf Notes

1. Twiddle or fiddle?

2. What will I think of next? Thoughts are like scenery of the mind. They come in and out of view and pass like the landscape.

3. “This face which shows its age, has all the coin it started with, with the look of being counted too often.” Ted Kooser

4. “Ted Kooser is a poet for people who hate poetry.” -Amazon review from a reader

5. I had a good cry Sunday morning after digging up this published poem that my Irish grandmother wrote about her son John B, who died in the Philippines during the Baatan Death March of WWII. I never really understood it when I was younger, but now I do. It’s really quite good!

6. Is death the new neighbor / whose door I knocked on / when I was in second grade? / When I was brave to make / a future best friend / who I hadn’t yet met? / Did it drive me to take wrong exits / show up on ramps and bridges? / Is it like the new glasses / with a strong prescription\ / that I need time to get used to?  Read Death Cheats on Crossword Puzzles in its entirety HERE. 

7. Time Flies or Time for Scrabble? And when the clock short hand lines up with the 1, it looks like another long hand.

8. A Slew of Blue HERE. 

9. Butterflies like azaleas.

10. “Carl Jung’s attempt to articulate a single unified theory which embraces both matter and spirit and throws a bridge between time and eternity is called synchronicity. Synchronicity speaks of the profound hidden order and unity among all that exists.” -Murray Stein

11. Inheritance, heritage and inherent are like the body, mind and spirit of who we are.

12. Jim Carrey on the startling realization he came to after years of fame: It’s totally pointless to spend our whole lives creating and curating some specific identity for ourselves. This is all ego: desiring to be important, to be someone, to matter. In reality, this grasping at a singular identity brings us only pain and suffering, for three main reasons. One, it introduces a separation between us and all other beings that dishonors our inherent, interconnected nature. Two, it deludes us into thinking that things are not supposed to change — that we are not supposed to change. Three, it leads us away from resting in our own basic goodness, as it makes us feel that we aren’t enough just as we are, right now. The antidote to this suffering is to let go of this desire to be “someone.” As Carrey beautifully puts it, “The feeling of wholeness is a different feeling than me-ness.” To feel whole, we must let go of trying to maintain an image of “me.”

13. “And when you get blue, and you’ve lost all your dreams; There’s nothin’ like a campfire and a can of beans.” – Tom Waits, Lucky Day

_________Thirteen Thursday