Loose Leaf Notes

1. Best sign seen at President’s Day protest: Musk is a rat. Call 911 immediately.

2. “A serial liar with a mighty propaganda machine working overtime for him has convinced half the country that up is down, that honor is venality, and that integrity is just a ruse for suckers who believe all that garbage from our schoolbooks.” -The New Republic

3. My friend Kamala and I signed up. We went to add our voices to the writing on the wall at a President’s Day protest. The backdrop was a Trump merchandise store in Christiansburg, complete with propaganda filled billboards. Someone counted 50 protesters. – More HERE.

4. The signs of the time speak for themselves.

5. Joe drove me down Bent Mountain yesterday for a medical procedure in Roanoke that was already rescheduled once and it would be months to get another one. It’s a good thing he brought his chainsaw! We were only 20 minutes late for waiting for an hour in the waiting room. More HERE.

6. My blogger friend Bonnie says: A fellow in a kayak was swallowed by a whale, but he must not have tasted good because it immediately spit him back out.  Wow!  Was this like the story of Jonah and the whale?  Watch HERE. 

7. I can finally hear some of Pulitzer Prize winning rapper Kendrick Lamar lyrics (unlike at the Super Bowl). Even Lamar knows this: I can feel your reign when it cries / Gold lives inside of you… HERE.

8. Poetry as soul work. Age as a gold harvest. I’m working on a new poetry book project, titled Mining the Gold of the Inner Life. Blending memoir, dream work, mythology and contemplative reflection on meeting the challenge of “apprenticing ourselves to our own disappearance,” as coined by poet David Whyte, the poems in this collection explore my own aging as a developmental and universal stage, one that’s been shaped by blessings and losses with an underlying quest to bring it all to light.

9. Best poem heard this week, Cold Solace by Anna Belle Kaufman read by Emily Levine, HERE.

1o. The Golden Years: The days of life scatter / like the goldfinch / on Woods Gap Road / The closer I get / the faster they go / like years escaped / from time constraints / with a fleeting beauty / that I can’t see up close

11. Rising from the roadsides / they leave me in their dust / They fly from my heart / like children who have grown / Like babies never born / they take their last chances / and fly like souls / freed from cages / into the next life

12. Sign of the Times 2021 post:  In recent years anonymously placed red signs began to appear in downtown Floyd. The signs bore positive messages, such as “Try Kindness” or “Love Grants Freedom – Fear Takes It Away.” One sign, placed at a worksite, said “Nice Job, Guys.” See more HERE.

 

13. Who knew? I found this video on youtube of me and my friend Susanna dancing at Buffalo Mountain Brewery to the Deer Run Drifters to their song Whiskey in My Whiskey.

_______Thirteen Thursday