Thursday, June 30, 2016

Isak Dinesen

“When you have a great and difficult task, something perhaps almost impossible, if you only work a little at a time, every day a little, suddenly the work will finish itself.”
― Isak Dinesen

“Write a little every day, without hope, without despair.”
― Isak Dinesen

“All sorrows can be borne if you can put them into a story.”
― Isak Dinesen

Life Imitates Dream

This morning I dreamed of a red truck totaling another car while getting out of a parking space. In the dream I walked right up to the truck and got the license plate to give to the police.

When I woke up I went into my yard to write. I heard a car drive up and park nearby with the motor running. It was hidden behind the bush next to my fence. I got up and glanced at the license plate and wrote it down. I began wheeling out my trash barrels to the sidewalk. As I was coming to get the second barrel a beady-eyed guy I recognize came running up to the car. I noticed the driver's right arm was an inked sleeve of tattoos resting on the steering wheel. There was a quick exchange and then the beady-eyed guy ran off. I had the feeling he was coming back. And two minutes later he did. They had another exchange of invisible items and then parted.

Dizzy

Last night when we walked Lily we turned onto Elbow Street near the ballfield and heard an ambulance and fire truck approaching. They drove right onto the lit-up baseball field. A bunch of EMT's and firemen wearing blue shirts and blue latex gloves got out. Two nurses aides in pink flower-print scrubs with identity lanyards ran over from the high-rise to see what happened. "Two baseball players collided when reaching for the softball," they reported to the gathering crowd. "One man twisted and fell, breaking his leg. He snapped the bone and it was poking out. Poor guy must be in excruciating pain." I felt dizzy with empathy.

A Library

A library is a hospital for the mind.

- Anonymous
― Alvin Toffler

Alvin Toffler

You’ve got to think about big things while you’re doing small things, so that all the small things go in the right direction.
― Alvin Toffler

Spy Eyes

Rita heard a car door. She glanced out the window and saw a muscled man wearing a black T-shirt jump out of an unfamiliar car. The car drove off. The man walked over to another car, a Jeep that appeared to be waiting for him. He made a transaction with the driver, a woman with long fingernails. She drove off and the man vanished between two buildings, his tanned bare ankle visible as he stepped away.

Rita's father was a detective but left the family when she was two. She had inherited his eyes. Detective eyes. She couldn't shut them off. She even dreamed with spy-eyes. Wherever she went she could see things others did not see. She felt like a dog who hears and smells things that humans always miss.

Czesław Miłosz

Since poetry deals with the singular, not the general, it cannot - if it is good poetry - look at things of this earth other than as colorful, variegated, and exciting, and so, it cannot reduce life, with all its pain, horror, suffering, and ecstasy, to a unified tonality of boredom and complaint. By necessity poetry is therefore on the side of being and against nothingness.
― Czesław Miłosz, A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry

Czeslaw Milosz

Language is the only homeland.
- Czeslaw Milosz

The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.
― Czesław Miłosz

Not that I want to be a god or a hero. Just to change into a tree, grow for ages, not hurt anyone.
― Czesław Miłosz

Dream

I dreamed I watched a red pickup truck parked in a small parking space push another parked car out of the way, crushing it. I walked up to the truck and got the license plate.

Wednesday, June 29, 2016

Paul Simon

“All of a sudden you’re there, and you’re surprised. This happened to me at times where some line comes out, where I’m the audience and it’s real, and I have to stop, because I’m crying. I didn’t know I was going to say that, didn’t know that I felt that, didn’t know that was really true. I have to stop and catch my breath.”
- Paul Simon

Article

Tuesday, June 28, 2016

Space

Congratulations you have been selected to win a brand new SUV and 25 thousand dollars in cash. CLICK. I don't want those things I just want space in my head, not stuff. How un-American. I thought about the guy who button-holed me on my walk last night. He had gaps between every tooth on the top row. I kept getting lost in his tinted tombstones as he told about his recently dead Shiba Inu. "I made her a coffin," he said taking out his cell phone to show it to me. He had an enormous jaw and dark stubble on his chin. "She protected me when I was sleeping in the woods," he said. "They're the best," I said. I glanced down at Lily and took a few steps tightening the leash. "Have a nice night," I said, resuming my walk.

Space, space, space. I can't seem to get enough of it lately. Bring back the 30 degree winter days. Everywhere I go people want to talk. I need to not talk. I sat in my room with the fan blowing humid air at my bare feet and shut my eyes. "Meditating?" my mind asked me. A steady stream of chatter streamed out of my pen onto my notebook page. I'm just the secretary. "Just cleaning out the muddy mind," I thought, responding to the question. "I'd like to run away and be someone else for a while, but nothing would work with who I am. It's too late. And anyway, traveling into space only requires imagination."

We Embraced who we Were

Government leaders from three smaller, northeastern cities shared success stories about their revitalization efforts.
Article

Monday, June 27, 2016

Robert Bly

So the person who has eaten his shadow spreads calmness, and shows more grief than anger. If the ancients were right that darkness contains intelligence and nourishment and even information, then the person who has eaten some of his or her shadow is more energetic as well as more intelligent.
- Robert Bly, A Little Book on the Human Shadow (pg 42)

Alice McDermott

We are surrounded by story.
― Alice McDermott

Lucille Clifton

Children [...] need both windows and mirrors in their lives: mirrors through which you can see yourself and windows through which you can see the world," she explained. "And minority children have not had mirrors. That has placed them at a disadvantage. If you want to call white children majority children - [they] have had only mirrors. That has placed them at a disadvantage also.
- Lucille Clifton, Writer's Almanac

Alice McDermott

The continually reassuring thing is that we're all novices when we start a new work.
- Alice McDermott

Saturday, June 25, 2016

Emily Dickinson

If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.
- Emily Dickinson

Nin Andrews

Read

Michael Phelps

Once my father and I started talking, I haven’t had a dream about snakes.
- Michael Phelps
Article

Jimmy Santiago Baca

But when at last I wrote my first words on the page, I felt an island rising beneath my feet like the back of a whale. As more and more words emerged, I could finally rest: I had a place to stand for the first time in my life. The island grew, with each page, into a continent inhabited by people I knew and mapped with the life I lived.
- Jimmy Santiago Baca

Friday, June 24, 2016

Dancing Plague

June 24, 2016: on this day: outbreak of dancing mania begins in Germany

It was on this day in 1374 in Aachen, Germany that an outbreak of dancing plague or dancing mania, also known as St. Vitus’ Dance, first began. From Aachen it spread across central Europe and as far away as England and Madagascar. Dancing mania affected groups of people — as many as thousands at a time — and caused them to dance uncontrollably for days, weeks, and even months until they collapsed from exhaustion. Some danced themselves to death, suffering heart attacks or broken hips and ribs. At the time, people believed the plague was the result of a curse from St. Vitus. Scientists now tend to believe it was due to ergot poisoning or mass hysteria.
source

Luba Cortés

We will have to keep fighting to live without fear in this place we call home. But in moments like these, of sadness and defeat, I think of the night that we crossed the border. As we were running, I fell and for a moment looked up to the night sky, scared that I would be left behind. But my mom was there, she was there all along — she picked me up, and we started running again.
Article

Language can save Landscape

Can Poets Save the Parks?
“Nothing like trees to make you feel better.”
Article

Thursday, June 23, 2016

Summer in the 'Hood

This morning while I hung out the clothes to dry three neighborhood five-year-olds discovered a broken cellar window on the tenement next door. They found cinder blocks and a brick holding up the dismantled basketball hoop and began chucking them through the missing window pane. I went over and asked them to stop. When I turned around a man was going through our recycling trash for returnable cans and bottles, emptying the cardboard and paper onto the street. Now there's three kids in a blow up pool in front of the tenement across the street having fun splashing each other while they are sitting waist high in cold water. Summer in the 'hood.

Dream

"Have you ever run before?" A girl asked me.
"Only when someone is chasing me," I said.
I was putting on my running shoes preparing to go for a run. I was on Harris Avenue. I was wearing a nun's habit. Two nuns drove by in a camouflaged tank, noticing me.

Dream

I dreamed I rescued a kitten from the clutches of a hawk. She was unharmed but in shock. I put her in a small round basket lined with cloth to recover and I brought her into my house. I was adopting her.

Wednesday, June 22, 2016

Good Luck

I saw Alex yesterday. He was dressed as a woman. When he bent down to pet Lily I saw the gray and blue socks stuffed in his bra. He's a beautiful soul. He had his black and white composition book in his hand and his black hair was tied up in two tiny pig tails. We shook hands. "Great to see you, it's always a treat," I said.
"Likewise," he replied.
I noticed the scars on his tan arms.
"How are you?" he asked me.
"I'm okay. How are you?" I asked.
"Pretty good. I was on a medication that wasn't letting me sleep, it kept me awake for three days, and my legs kept moving," he said.
"Restless legs?" I asked.
"Yeah. Now they have me on a higher dose of two different medications and I can sleep," he said.
"That's good. Sleep is important," I said.
"I know. They told me if I have any more trouble to let them know," he said.
"It's good that you live so close to your doctor. You can walk right over if you need him," I said.
Alex paused for a moment.
"Hey, I have a phone number of a person I like," he said, smiling.
"That's exciting. When are you going to call?"
"Tomorrow."
"Good luck!"

David Denby

"We don’t know how to educate poor children in this country."
Article

Just like in the Movies

I was walking Lily downtown this morning when four police officers and detectives came running out of headquarters. They jumped into their cars and raced down Clinton Street with lights flashing and sirens sounding. Just like in the movies.

Sunday, June 19, 2016

Tobias Wolff

There are very few professions in which people just sit down and think hard for five or six hours a day all by themselves. [If you become a writer] you have the liberty to do that, but once you have the liberty you also have the obligation to do it.
- Tobias Wolff

A true piece of writing is a dangerous thing. It can change your life.
― Tobias Wolff, Old School

Blaise Pascal

Man is to himself the most wonderful object in nature; for he cannot conceive what the body is, still less what the mind is, and least of all how a body should be united to a mind. This is the consummation of his difficulties, and yet it is his very being.
― Blaise Pascal

The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of... We know the truth not only by the reason, but by the heart.
― Blaise Pascal

All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

I would prefer an intelligent hell to a stupid paradise.
― Blaise Pascal

Dream

Two nights ago I dreamed that I was lying down on my back on the bottom of the neighborhood pool, as a way to meditate.

Saturday, June 18, 2016

Chris Van Allsburg

The idea of the extraordinary happening in the context of the ordinary is what's kind of fascinating to me.
- Chris Van Allsburg

Friday, June 17, 2016

Christo's Floating Piers

At the close of its 16-day period, the walkway will be dismantled and its parts recycled and resold. “The important part of this project is the temporary part, the nomadic quality,” Christo said. “The work needs to be gone, because I do not own the work, no one does. This is why it is free.”
Article

Take Care

Take care of things close to home first. Straighten up your room before you save the world. Then save the world.
- Ron Padgett

Thursday, June 16, 2016

Poor Man's Travel

Today I am crawling around under the usual patterns of the day feeling like I've skipped school. Sometimes I have to change my routine and everything is new again. I call it poor man's travel. I have been dying for space from my thoughts and moods but the real space is found by traveling in my imagination through the work of writing and drawing.

Nin Andrews

Wonderful blog http://www.ninandrews.com/blog/

Wednesday, June 15, 2016

Saul Steinberg

The doodle is the brooding of the hand.
― Saul Steinberg

The life of the creative man is led, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.
― Saul Steinberg

The frightening thought that what you draw may become a building makes for reasoned lines.
― Saul Steinberg

Tuesday, June 14, 2016

Thich Nhat Hanh

Suffering is not enough. Life is both dreadful and wonderful...How can I smile when I am filled with so much sorrow? It is natural--you need to smile to your sorrow because you are more than your sorrow.
― Thich Nhat Hanh

Thich Nhat Hanh

We are here to awaken from our illusion of separateness.
― Thich Nhat Hanh

Thich Nhat Hanh

When you plant lettuce, if it does not grow well, you don't blame the lettuce. You look for reasons it is not doing well. It may need fertilizer, or more water, or less sun. You never blame the lettuce. Yet if we have problems with our friends or family, we blame the other person. But if we know how to take care of them, they will grow well, like the lettuce. Blaming has no positive effect at all, nor does trying to persuade using reason and argument. That is my experience. No blame, no reasoning, no argument, just understanding. If you understand, and you show that you understand, you can love, and the situation will change.
― Thich Nhat Hanh

Monday, June 13, 2016

Bear Wanders into Providence

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Bears be warned — a getaway to the city might end with a ride in the prisoner transport van.

A black bear first spotted on Saturday night in Cranston made its way to Providence, in the early hours Sunday, before it was captured and released in the woods near the Connecticut state line.

The adventure (for the humans, anyway) started just before 9 p.m. whena woman called the Cranston Police Department to tell them there was a black bear in her backyard on Pontiac Avenue., said Maj. Todd Patalano.
“This isn't something we usually encounter,” he said.

Article

Overheard

Last night while walking Lily down Hazel Street two 12 year old kids were playing basketball. I heard one kid say to the other:
All I know is, when you get hit on your head and it bleeds a lot, you lose your memory.

Friday, June 10, 2016

Chaos Theory

a woman folds a napkin blotting her lipstick in Louisiana
causing a taxi to ride over a curb in Manhattan
setting off a herd of wild bison stampeding in Oklahoma
causing a paper cut in Elizabeth New Jersey
making lightning strike in Los Angeles

Alternatives

“So much of pain is tied up with fear,” Dr. LaPietra continued. “We can do more than we think, if we can just take the time to sit with patients and let them know we’re present for them.”

Then she smiled and shrugged. “And when we can get it right, why not, especially if we don’t have to use opioids?”

Article

Saul Bellow

You’re all alone when you’re a writer. Sometimes you just feel you need a humanity bath. Even a ride in the subway will do that. But it’s much more interesting to talk about books. After all, that’s what life used to be for writers: they talk books, politics, history, America. Nothing has replaced that.
- Saul Bellow

Terence Rattigan

A novelist may lose his readers for a few pages; a playwright never dares lose his audience for a minute.
- Terence Rattigan

Linguistic Free Love

“The period now has an emotional charge and has become an emoticon of sorts,” Professor Crystal said “In the 1990s the internet created an ethos of linguistic free love where breaking the rules was encouraged and punctuation was one of the ways this could be done”

source

Thursday, June 09, 2016

Patricia Cornwell

There was so much unhappiness around me and a lot of things were really scary. I found that creating stories made the world safer. I felt more in control. Writing makes me feel better.
- Patricia Cornwell

Wednesday, June 08, 2016

Daydream

After looking at de Chirico paintings I left the house to go swim. When I arrived I noticed that there was a man in the pool who I hadn't seen before. He looked just like Gorgio de Chirico. I imagined swimming in a pool with de Chirico, we'd be inside one of his paintings. We'd say nothing but we would both know where we were by the colors, shadows and architecture.

Monday, June 06, 2016

Max Ernst

Every normal human being (and not merely the 'artist') has an inexhaustible store of buried images in his subconscious, it is merely a matter of courage or liberating procedures ... of voyages into the unconscious, to bring pure and unadulterated found objects to light.
- Max Ernst

Painting is neither decorative amusement, nor the plastic invention of felt reality; it must be every time: invention, discovery, revelation.
- Max Ernst

Creativity is that marvelous capacity to grasp mutually distinct realities and draw a spark from their juxtaposition.
- Max Ernst

Giorgio de Chirico

It is essential that the revelation we receive, the conception of an image which embraces a certain thing, which has no sense of itself, which has no subject, which means absolutely nothing from the logical point of view... should speak so strongly in us... that we feel compelled to paint...
- Giorgio de Chirico

We must hold enormous faith in ourselves.
- Giorgio de Chirico

De Chirico: The Two Aspects

Everything has two aspects; the current aspect, which we see nearly always and which ordinary men see, and the ghostly and metaphysical aspect, which only rare individuals may see in moments of clairvoyance and metaphysical abstraction.
- Giorgio de Chirico

De Chirico: Visions and Dreams

To become truly immortal, a work of art must escape all human limits: logic and common sense will only interfere. But once these barriers are broken, it will enter the realms of childhood visions and dreams.
- Giorgio de Chirico

de Chirico Mystery

There is much more mystery in the shadow of a man walking on a sunny day, than in all religions of the world.
- Giorgio de Chirico

Giorgio de Chirico

One must picture everything in the world as an enigma, and live in the world as if in a vast museum of strangeness.
- Giorgio de Chirico

Article on Bill T. Jones Dance Coreography

“FAME,” WROTE Rainer Maria Rilke, in 1902, “is, after all, only the sum of all the misunderstandings that gather around a new name.” The line appears at the beginning of a short book on Auguste Rodin that a 27-year-old Rilke published when the world-­famous sculptor was 63. However much we think we know about Rodin, the young poet argued, we’re wrong. And yet, Rilke goes on to say, it’s not even worth taking the time to disabuse us of our errors, “for they gathered around the name, not around the work.”
[...]
[...] it is experimental in the way of the seeker, rather than the provocateur, more prayer than sermon.
[...]
When performing “21” for his audience of one, Jones seemed less like a man intent upon confronting his audience than confronting himself. Watching him, I wondered where he got the strength to do all that looking.

Article

The Opioid Crisis in Rhode Island

“We still need to stop [heroin] at its source and law enforcement has a legitimate role in preventing drug dealers from peddling their wares and in many cases killing their customers,” Kilmartin says. “But this is a classic case of where health advocacy and law enforcement intersect, and if there has ever been a problem you can’t arrest yourself out of, this is it.”
Article

Dream

I dreamed there was an outdoor festival of male mermaids. They were diving from wooden bleachers and swimming in a pond. I was a bystander wearing a summer skirt. I climbed around on the sand under the staging area. I noticed spiders in between the beams of the scaffolding. The more I looked the more spiders I saw and some were huge and scary. I raced out of there.

Dream

I dreamed I was teaching an after school art class. Many students and adults showed up. We held the class outside. I suggested they draw something in their immediate environment like their hand, using an ebony pencil. One student said she had diabetes and couldn't use an ebony pencil but that soon an equivalent would be available. I noticed that she had large teeth with severely receded gums. I wondered how her teeth held on to her jaw.

Sunday, June 05, 2016

Malvina Reynolds

Little Boxes

song by Malvina Reynolds

Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky tacky,1
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same.
There's a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one,
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

And the people in the houses
All went to the university,
Where they were put in boxes
And they came out all the same,
And there's doctors and lawyers,
And business executives,
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

And they all play on the golf course
And drink their martinis dry,
And they all have pretty children
And the children go to school,
And the children go to summer camp
And then to the university,
Where they are put in boxes
And they come out all the same.

And the boys go into business
And marry and raise a family
In boxes made of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.
There's a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one,
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.


Notes: words and music by Malvina Reynolds; copyright 1962 Schroder Music Company, renewed 1990. Malvina and her husband were on their way from where they lived in Berkeley, through San Francisco and down the peninsula to La Honda where she was to sing at a meeting of the Friends’ Committee on Legislation (not the PTA, as Pete Seeger says in the documentary about Malvina, “Love It Like a Fool”). As she drove through Daly City, she said “Bud, take the wheel. I feel a song coming on.”

Additional notes
1. The term "ticky tacky" is now included in the Oxford English Dictionary, and credited to Malvina.
2. Seeger's recording reached as high as number seventy on Billboard and number seventy-two on Cashbox in early 1964.
3. The Womenfolk's version peaked at number eighty-three on Billboard and number ninety-six on Cashbox in May 1964.

source

Balance

She went to a catered garden party in the prim and trim subdivision. She knew it would set off a firestorm in her head. Not that she wouldn't enjoy the event and the hosts but because of how she was raised. Her family taught her to expect that this is how life should be. This thought lingered and followed her home. She knew it would but she had decided to get out and go to the party anyway. "It's not good to stay in your own comfort zone forever," she told herself while putting on her polka-dotted party skirt.

After the party she came home and flicked on the TV and watched a murder mystery to drown out her thoughts. When she woke up the next morning she recalled the party of gourmet sandwiches, imported olives, and assorted cheeses presented under a tent. She also recalled the tour of the hostess' home. It was like a doll house. The surfaces were without dust and the shiny wooden floors were without scratches. It was a fantasy stage set just like the photos in design magazines. Even the small cluster of garden plants were all tastefully arranged, in bloom and weedless. She recalled glancing up and down the street and noticing that all of these little homes and gardens were done up to the same pristine pitch. Was it a competition, peer pressure, a war? She couldn't imagine one of her own pieces of furniture belonging inside the doll house or the garden.

She got out of bed and let her dog into the yard. She noticed white rumpled papers in the corner of the chain link fence near her peeling yellow garage. She was in the habit of picking up trash in her urban, impoverished neighborhood. As she got closer to the gate she realized the white tissues were smeared brown. Her garage alcove had been used as a toilet. After the moment of shock and disgust she ran into the house and got a bunch of used plastic bags to cover her hands and she cleaned up the mess. "How sad, some poor soul had no place to go," she thought.

Saturday, June 04, 2016

A Writer

“When I was a little boy, they called me a liar, but now that I am grown up, they call me a writer.”
― Isaac Bashevis Singer

Isaac Bashevis Singer: The Chasm

“Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression. The chasm is never completely bridged. We all have the conviction, perhaps illusory, that we have much more to say than appears on the paper.”
― Isaac Bashevis Singer

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Kindness, I've discovered, is everything in life.
- Isaac Bashevis Singer

Isaac Bashevis Singer

For those who are willing to make an effort, great miracles and wonderful treasures are in store.
- Isaac Bashevis Singer

Carson McCullers

I live with the people I create and it has always made my essential loneliness less keen.
- Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers

“It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind. With Americans, it is a national trait, as native to us as the roller-coaster or the jukebox. It is no simple longing for the home town or country of our birth. The emotion is Janus-faced: we are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.”
― Carson McCullers

Kim Addonizio

I love you like I'm a strange backyard and you're running from the cops, looking for a place to stash your gun.
- Kim Addonizio
excerpt from the poem "Forms of Love", from Lucifer at the Starlite

Friday, June 03, 2016

Edmund Hillary

There is something about building up a comradeship - that I still believe is the greatest of all feats - and sharing in the dangers with your company of peers. It's the intense effort, the giving of everything you've got. It's really a very pleasant sensation.
- Edmund Hillary

Good planning is important. I've also regarded a sense of humor as one of the most important things on a big expedition. When you're in a difficult or dangerous situation, or when you're depressed about the chances of success, someone who can make you laugh eases the tension.
- Edmund Hillary

It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.
- Edmund Hillary

Kim Addonizio

He could tell that she was something else. Someone less than she was, who didn't deserve respect, who men could handle like a bar of soap, leaving themselves clean and satisfied and her disappearing down to nothing.
- Kim Addonizio, My Dreams Out in the Street (pg 5)

The Id that Ate the Planet

Article

Dream

I dreamed I bought the house next door to connect it to mine. I was looking out the second floor windows admiring the view down the street. In my dream the second floor apartment had once been a gallery. "It has great north light," I said to the real estate agent.

Dream

I dreamed my husband and I were in Africa visiting A, an old family friend. She came out to see us in her dusty dry courtyard. She was wearing a metal brace on her back from an accident. There were big black bears roaming around us. I climbed on a ladder to pet one bear on top of his head. Then he put my left hand in his mouth but I was able to release it unscathed. A had metal rods on her doors like police locks to keep the wild animals out.

Thursday, June 02, 2016

Dream

"How soon after her death did you receive the notice from the FBI?" The voice on the telephone asked. "Within a day," she replied. She was sitting in a swivel chair in front of a huge wooden office desk. She had an open orange cardboard package in front of her. It contained a cassette tape from the FBI.
My husband had to shake me awake from this dream to say goodbye for the day.

Wednesday, June 01, 2016

Motion and Mood

Some weakening in mental function appears to be inevitable as we age. But emerging science suggests that we might be able to slow and mitigate the decline by how we live and, in particular, whether and how we move our bodies. Past studies have found that people who run, weight train, dance, practice tai chi, or regularly garden have a lower risk of developing dementia than people who are not physically active at all.

There also is growing evidence that combining physical activity with meditation might intensify the benefits of both pursuits. [...] For example, people with depression who meditated before they went for a run showed greater improvements in their mood than people who did either of those activities alone.

Article

RI Serves as an Inspiring Example for Connecticut on the Opiate Epidemic

Unlike Massachusetts and Rhode Island, Connecticut hasn't yet drawn up a focused state plan to respond to opiate overdoses. But that's about to change. In a welcome move, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy has asked Dr. David Fiellin and a team of doctors who are addiction specialists from Yale School of Medicine to create, in 90 days, a strategy to reduce opioid addiction and overdoses here over the next three years. The governor has directed the team to use Rhode Island's strategic plan as a model for Connecticut.
http://www.courant.com/opinion/editorials/hc-ed-ct-opioid-epidemic-state-finally-has-a-plan-20160525-story.html

Dream

I dreamed my friend Dan was in costume driving a Bat mobile. I peeked inside and was surprised to see that it was a Honda.