Loose Leaf Notes

1. This is the picture of Joe that I texted to my grandson Liam because Liam likes this kind of crazy stuff.

2. On the porch at Dogtown where we were dancing to Freak Rangers, I thought I saw a sculpture of the virgin Mary from a distance, but upon looking closer, I saw it was a windex bottle with a cleaning rag over it.

3. “Do we see reality as it is or as we need it to be that we continue to survive?  Neuroscientists tell us that our brains are constructing everything that we see, but we don’t construct the whole world at once. Rather, we construct what we need in the moment.” -Donald Hoffman, cognitive scientist

4. Reality is a hat trick / if you believe it / A mythological truth / that dissolves or lasts forever / A Cinderellas story / on a silver platter – Read my poem Reality in its entirety HERE. 

5. Trying to wrap my head around it.

6. THIS is just one occasion that Leo, my neighbor for 35 years, stepped up for me.  He later hauled it off with his tractor.

7. “You know that the price of life is death, that the price of love is loss, and still you watch the golden afternoon light fall on a face you love, knowing that the light will soon fade, knowing that the loving face too will one day fade to indifference or bone, and you love anyway — because life is transient but possible, because love alone bridges the impossible and the eternal.” Maria Popova

8. Notebook entry: My wit is no longer so quick. My cowlicks are set in their ways.

9. One by one, the monarchs are passing / like hikers on the Appalachian Trail / Like tourists waving goodbye to admirers / on their way to the next town / They fly by like models down a runway / flashing their high fashion style / In a fall show marking summer’s close / they sail the wild blue as they go.

10.  Joe and I spread our wings at Turner Family Farm’s Fall Festival. Story coming…

11. I don’t believe in Big Foot, but I do believe in the Scituate Sea Monster. In 1970 it washed up on the shore of a beach near where I was working a nightshift in home health care. I went and saw it with my own eyes. It had a small horse-shaped head, long neck and a large body mass with fin-like appendages. Someone from Harvard said it was a washed up basking shark. I did not believe that. See a picture HERE. 

12. Dear God, Are you an operating system? / Are you catfishing people you’ll never meet for prayers and obedience? / Can I call me you and you me? / Are you a figment, a hologram or a referee? / Are you a chain reaction? / Do you have checks and balances? / Are you a big bang that knows me / on a first name basis?   Read my poem No Pronouns Need Apply in its entirety HERE. 

13. “Louise Erdrich’s 2005 novel The Painted Drum (public library) flits across the sky of my mind: 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.”

__________Thirteen Thursday