Loose Leaf Notes

1. Our Valentine time started with dancing to Dead Reckoning at Dogtown. The band played a lot of love songs: They Love Each Other, Turn on Your Lovelight and more.

2. I once asked Joe what song with the word ‘love” in the title comes to his mind first.  He answered, “Love Me Do,” by the Beatles.  Mine was “What’s Love Got to Do with It?” And the answer is “everything.”

3. Our long-time spiritual teacher of Passage Meditation, Eknath Easwaran, recommended sticking with one mantra once you choose it. He warned against digging shallow wells in many places, because you’ll never go deep enough to find water if you do. I feel that way about marriage.

4. Dream Come True – I had a dream that my 14-year-old grandson, who I don’t see much these days, was little again, and he was in my care. At one point in the dream, I said to him with all my heart, “Hopa (Joe) and I are so lucky because we were given two such beautiful grandsons.” I watched his expression soften as he recieved it. A day after the dream, we were celebrating my youngest son’s (his dad’s) birthday at the Plum Noodle House and I told him I had a dream about him and repeated that same line.  I watched him receive it just as he did in the dream.

5. When Joe and I first got together, 38 years ago, I wanted to tell him how I felt about him, but saying “I love you” seemed kind of trite. Eventually, I found myself spontaneously saying, “I am so loving you.”

6. Jump rope songs and nursery rhymes were my first introductions to poetry.

7. Joey Klein took his time / to make me his valentine / He drew a heart / and said, “That’s a start / Now we’ll never be apart”

8. Colleen Ann made a plan / to make Joe Klein her valentine / She blew a kiss / and said, “That’s it / You can’t resist / My love’s the best!”

9. I searched Kiss on this blog and THIS blast from the past came up.

10. “Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.” – Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

11. We lost a few special friends from the alternative community in the last couple of months, Bruce, Luke and Joey. Joey was a visionary potter like no other. Back in the day, I was sent to do an interview for a story. I found him sitting at his wheel in his studio. He told me he likes to sit there and think.  He offered me some moonshine, and when I asked him how he got into being a potter, he said, “I’ve always liked the dirt. “I’m just a dirty f*cker, always down at the river catching salamanders and in the mud.” I had to edit some of that out of the story.  RIP, friend.

12. Return to Sender:  In lieu of death / send the living flowers / make your life payable / to all those you love

13. Outcomes are influenced by conscious observers / Intentions conspire to bring natural order / Everything bends to synergistic making / Every word has a place in the giving and taking – Read my poem Poetry Epilouge in its entirety HERE. 

____________Thirteen Thursday