Loose Leaf Notes

1. Mantra: Between wave and particle / its existence is in flux / like a pesky fly abuzz / its placement isn’t fixed

2. When we were on Siesta Key Beach earlier this month, I told Joe that I wanted to die on the beach, to be bundled up on a lounge chair in the sand with a big sky above me and the sea before me, where I could feel how small I am in comparison and let my ego drift away.

3. Then we started talking about living close to the beach and me starting a service taking dying people to the beach to die.

4. I’m convinced that if I was ever on Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Bill Murray would turn out to be my secret celebrity cousin.

5. As St. Patrick’s Day was approaching, I was looking through my closet for something green to wear. That night I dreamt I was at an event with lots of people and I was wearing only a green bath towel wrapped around me. I slowly began to regret not having something more substantial on and then I saw Bill Murray out the corner of my eye.  I acted like I knew him, and said, “Bill, I’m the most underdressed person here.” He laughed.

6. Later, when I was telling that dream to a group of friends around dinner after a Celtic music concert we all went to, it dawned on me that Bill Murray and I could be related because his grandfather was from Cork and so was my grandmother, whose mother’s name was Ellen Murray.

7. My friend Ash sang, Bonny Portmore, at the concert and it really hit home, touching into the grief surrounding today’s degradation of democratic freedoms and the longing for a higher good. “It’s about the sacred oak tree groves in Ireland that were deforested and taken away to be turned into warships by the English. It’s a song of grieving and honoring that which is dear to us.” Ash said. More at The Pipes Are Calling HERE.

8. ‘Love is but a song we sing / Fear’s the way we die.’ I told Joe that “Get Together” by the Youngbloods is a bucket list song, meaning he play it at my funeral after I kick the bucket.

9. Jesse Colin Young, who passed away this week, was a favorite musician of mine (right up there with Tom Rush) ever since my sister Sherry and I saw him with the Youngbloods at the Boston Music Hall in 1971. I saw him again many years later at the Harvester in Rocky Mount VA. My sister says that Get Together would be a good song needed now, but I’d like to change the title to “C’mon People.”

10. I call this picture before ‘Winter Camouflage.’

11. Similar shadow patio shot on a spring day HERE.  

12. Synchronicity in psychology:  The term synchronicity was coined by Carl Jung—the famous Swiss author, thinker, and psychologist—as “a meaningful coincidence of two or more events where something other than the probability of chance is involved.” The event is meaningful because what happens in the external world is mirroring something happening in your internal world. An example would be cleaning out a closet and finding pictures of an old friend from college whom you haven’t connected with in 10 years—and days later, getting an email from that same old friend. From a psychological viewpoint, synchronicities might help us notice the power of our minds beyond our understanding, like the ability of our minds to speak to us in dreams or connect with the minds of others.

13. First bloom.

_________Thirteen Thursday