Loose Leaf Notes

1. This could also be called The Gravity of the Grave.

2. One day my body / will fall like a star / I’ll burn like a poem on paper  / I’ll radiate ember  / and scatter like ash / Someone will make a wish. – From A Ticket Home

3. Like a bee buzzing for nectar from flower by flower. That’s the love note I put in my longtime dear friend Luke’s casket this weekend. He said those words to me about my dancing. Now it’s him buzzing for nectar from flower to flower.

4. “I too subscribe to a Jungian framework that sees the world as a living dream-text to be interpreted. I too, understand that major historical or physical events as, also, psychic realities that both reflect and reveal deep structures of the collective unconscious, which sees our shared world as something like a synchronistic loom.” Adapted from Fall in the Family – Rob Reiner’s archetypal death and the collapse of civic discourse by Daniel Pinchbeck

5.  As we grow older, “loss becomes the primary condition of living. That doesn’t mean you’re in a hopeless, grief-stricken state all the time; it just means that you carry a deeper understanding of what it is to be human.” Nick Cage

6. Every day is a loss / of yesterday / Every tear feeds a seed / for new ground – Read Bardo in its entirety HERE. 

7. This could also be called The Gravity of Grace.

8. Silence does not mean nothing is happening. It means the brain is finally being heard. Scientists have discovered that just two hours of complete silence can spark the growth of new brain cells in regions tied to memory and emotion. In controlled studies, the hippocampus lit up after silent sessions, showing signs of neural activity associated with learning and repair. When external noise fades, internal attention networks activate. The brain lowers its sensory workload, redirects energy inward, and begins restoring itself from within… When the world gets loud, silence becomes a form of medicine.  Via Duke University research

9. The sky cuts a remnant / from the longest night / for a red-carpet spread / that warms as it mends / that unfolds the hold / of times outgrown / with room to move / and new patterns to choose – Read my poem The Tight Fit in its entirety HERE.

10. “In 2008 evolutionary anthropologist Katie Hinde was working in a primate research lab in California, analyzing breast milk from rhesus macaque mothers. She had hundreds of samples and thousands of data points. Everything looked routine until one pattern refused to disappear. Mothers raising sons produced milk richer in fat and protein. Mothers raising daughters produced a larger volume with different nutrient balances. It was consistent. Repeatable. And deeply uncomfortable for the scientific consensus. Milk is not just nutrition. It is information. Katie kept going…”

11. …When a baby nurses, microscopic amounts of saliva flow back into the breast. That saliva carries biological signals about the infant’s immune system. If the baby is getting sick, the mother’s body detects it. Within hours the milk changes. White blood cells increase. Macrophages multiply. Targeted antibodies appear. When the baby recovers, the milk returns to baseline… The implications are enormous. Milk has been evolving for more than two hundred million years.  In 2017 Katie brought this work to a TED stage. In 2020 it reached a global audience through the Netflix series Babies Katie Hinde did not just study milk. She revealed that nourishment is intelligence. A living responsive system shaping who we become before we ever speak.” –  Hinde’s blog Mammals Suck… Milk! is HERE.

12. I want the billionaire bah humbugs / of the world to be haunted / Shamed by Christmas ghosts / into epiphanies of conscience / I want the children fed and swaddled / and the poor among us sheltered / I don’t want our North star / to be mistaken for bombs of war – Read my poem Christmas morning in its entirety HERE. 

13. I hope your Holidays are happy and chill.

___________Thirteen Thursday