More Leaf (Brain) Magic

Picked up a nice big leaf today on my regular stroll through the cemetery with Tammy Da Whammy and Willo Da Pillo (left to right)....


Recently I have acquired the habit of carefully inspecting the dirt roadways and paved pathways that wind through this delightful escape from the city. It pays.

Most people avoid this place, bones and gravestones are a turn off to most. It only occurs to a few how nice a place it is to be. After a while, it hardly even occurs to you that only a few feet under the topsoil are skeletons galore. The zen masters require students in training to go to the undertaker and sit with decomposing bodies for a week. This rids the student of fear of death. I haven't done that, but I certainly think that I've picked up quite a bit of friendly spirit communication on my walks. From this side, my hours and hours at the cemetery does seem to have made "going to the other side" not such a bad fate after all (when the time comes). It's a lot nicer being here than being downtown in many ways.

The cemetery that I frequent is only a short way from home, but far enough removed from any major streets that once inside the grounds it is very quiet and peaceful. It is a rather large place, nearly a square mile, if not more. The oldest grave goes back to 1863, and all of the roads and pathways were originally and deliberately planned to look "unplanned". This gives it a very quaint and much older appearance, and a very park like atmosphere.

The creators of this cemetery further saw into the future- with frontal lobes time travel insight- and planted over 4000 trees, making it the largest arboretum in the state. This was a gift to all the visitors walking through here, 140 years later. True advanced FL thinking way back then.

I've learned a few things about trees, as there are dozens of varieties here; which trees hold on to their brown and red leaves most of the winter and which trees turn what colors in the fall. (The other day there was a raven convention with hundreds of big black ravens flying in swarming circles at the treetops making an unbelievable racket that sounded like a thunderstorm.)

This past year I've even taken to naming all of the streets and pathways here. I can't imagine anybody else has done that in a hundred years. But there must be ten miles of roadway in this place, and I've got a name for every single path and lane (and wrote it all down on a map of the place as well.)

If you want to become more aware and sensitive to your environment, especially things you pass every day and take for granted, try coming up with your own personal names for things everybody else ignores. I learned this brain trick from Lucy Maud Montgomery and her book character Anne of Green Gables. (Great series of books by the way.) It changes how things look. You feel more a part of things rather than just passing through numb. Things glow. It clicks on your brain where everybody else is just asleep. It turbocharges your creativity.

But the weirdest thing lately has been this: Money in the streets.

Normally I just look at the trees and birds and gravestones. But last week while walking through I found a penny. So, I began to glance down directly where I was walking. I got no further than ten feet, and found another coin. Then another, and another, and another. The first day I started looking, I found $1 in change. The next day $1.50. This went on for several days, and then I must have cleaned out the place, although every day since I've found at least a little bit (today 11 cents!)

The strange part is, I'm not the only one walking through here. There are dozens of people walking through this place, maybe even a hundred on any given day. I guess everybody has holes in their pockets. Either that, or millionaires buried here are materializing coins to see if any body is paying any attention.


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