Loose Leaf Notes

1. The word Resolution reminds me of a military drill command like “Attention” or “Forward March.”

2. “Sometimes one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it, attentive to what it exposes or demands.” -May Sarton on the Cure for Despair and Why Solitude Is the Seedbed of Self-Discovery

3. I want to wake up Christmas morning / like Ebenezer Scrooge did / and know there’s still time / I want jingle bells to chime / and not be drowned out / by the sound / of Jacob Marley’s chains… Read My Poem “Christmas Morning” in its entirety HERE.

4. “And it dawned on me that I might have to change my inner thought patterns…that I would have to start believing in possibilities that I wouldn’t have allowed before, that I had been closing my creativity down to a very narrow, controllable scale…that things had become too familiar and I might have to disorient myself.”​ — Bob Dylan

5. No Direction Home or A Complete Unknown? As someone who likes documentaries more than biopic movies that stretch the truth, I liked the new movie about Bob Dylan better than I thought I would.

6. I once was a drill co-captain. I was 13 and in the CYO drill team. I believe I was chosen because I gave the drill commands in a growling authoritative voice. (I’m three quarters to the right in a white hat and uniform in the photo where everyone else, except the other co-captain, was in red).

7. Some people I know growl out of frustration. I only growl to clear my throat.

8. Dreams are prescribed by the psyche, like medicine. They come in different strengths.

9. I had a dream recently that I woke up to a party in my house and yard that I didn’t know was going to happen and was unhappy about. I zeroed in on a little boy.  He was sitting at a steep ledge and wanted to dangle his legs off it. I tried to get him to move back but he fussed and didn’t want to, so I offered to sit with him while he was in my lap.

10. Another One Bites the Dust: We closed out 2024 with an epic Dogtown dance party. It’s a tradition! Dancing is my favorite kind of time travel. It’s Timeless HERE.

11. “How we spend our days,” Annie Dillard memorably wrote in her soul-stretching meditation on the life of presence, “is, of course, how we spend our lives.” And yet most of us spend our days in what Kierkegaard believed to be our greatest source of unhappiness — a refusal to recognize that “busy is a decision” and that presence is infinitely more rewarding than productivity. I frequently worry that being productive is the surest way to lull ourselves into a trance of passivity and busyness the greatest distraction from living, as we coast through our lives day after day, showing up for our obligations but being absent from our selves, mistaking the doing for the being.” -by Maria Popova

12. “NOW is presently overrated. Now is not what it was and is also never what we think it is. There is no power of now: now does not have any power by itself. Now belongs as much to its past inheritance, to what brought it about, as it does to its just-about-to-happen future. Now is not where we are supposed to live, isolated from the poignant and maturing illusions of memory or the joyous lineaments of anticipation: ‘now’ does not exist without its astonishing past nor its dreamy, not-to-believed future: Now is a word that in the last twenty years has definitely got above itself. Most tellingly, and as a final condemnation: now is a word that has lost its sense of humor. Saying we should live totally in the now is just as amusing as saying we should live totally in the twelve-and-a half -minutes-ago…” poet, David Whyte

13. I came THIS close to making a New Year’s Resolution.

________Thirteen Thursday