A favorite topic at Moonsoup.
This post includes audio excerpts read by Tessa Morgan.
Sound bites for a feast of the soul.
Also, instead of my usual download link
I’m using the WordPress Audio Player, just for a change.
For an interesting summary of the Upanishads go here.
Just click the “play” icon for each section-
Filed under mp3, poetry, Spirituality
Happy Father’s Day, all you fathers. May your day be sweet. May you forgive yourself for all the things, big and small, that cause you shame and suffering. May you be at peace.
In My Life, part 1
Father's Day has always been a little uncomfortable for me
My relationship with fatherhood is complicated. It’s complicated in origin- my dad was a good man plagued by bad demons. He could not be the father he wanted to be. It’s complicated also in it’s fruition of the parenthood experience- I am the parent of a dead girl, a suicide. I can’t claim to have been the father I wanted to be.
My dad struggled. He was deeply guilty, shamed by his mistakes. For many years I resented him. It took me a long time to see him as a “man”- subject to error and utterly worthy of absolution. I am so glad I came to understand that before he died. I am so sorry he died so quickly that I didn’t get a chance to really tell him. In the end, I was proud of him for everything he endured and overcame. I pray he is at peace.
My sons would probably disagree with my eligibility to wear the above button. I would have to say that over all, I’ve done a good job; certainly the best I knew how. Still, in my heart, I feel that I have failed deeply in ways that are both vital and obscure. 
Maybe we all fail. Maybe none of us can claim honestly
to have passed every test.
But wait! There’s more! In truth I have gained more peace as time moves along. Not just the peace of dimming memory but peace that comes from perspective. I see the essential rightness of even my worst mistakes. Like I said,
It’s complicated.
Tripler- click for full size, as usual
I was born in Tripler Army Hospital in Honolulu, Hawaii. My father was in the US Navy. He served aboard the class of ships referred to as “Destroyers”. His job, as a Gunner’s Mate and later a Chief Gunner’s Mate, eventually killed him. (He died over 30 years later from Mesothelioma). 
My dad was often gone during the first 5 years of my life. He would be “at sea”. That left my mom, bless her heart, to care for the 4 of us kids. She was tired. It was hard. 
It was probably harder and more tiring because she drank. Drinking enabled her to tune out my incessant crying (“colic”- my dad says I had the 6 month colic for 3 years but that it didn’t affect him much because he “would be at sea”.) 
My earliest memories are of standing in my crib, crying, and no one would come to pick me up or hold me. My oldest memories of my mom are of her seated at our cheap dining room table with a glass and a bottle of wine. 
Anyway, the thing is (this is the thing), I’ve been wanting to do some storytelling. As a subject, I find my life to have been extraordinarily interesting. This most likely means that it has been remarkably average. As average stories go, it has been chock full of twists, drama and dark humor; all the elements of a reasonably good strory. This is the start.
I just got a call from my oldest son. He lives near San Fransisco. He called to say “Happy Father’s Day”. I really can’t fault myself too much. He is the nicest, best, most gentle man I know. My younger son is also wonderful- smart, funny, creative and caring. They are both excellent men.
Filed under personal story, pictures
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Big Pharm
10 Search Engines you’ve never heard of
that will open up a whole new world of information
that you never really needed anyway
Very Bad Idea:
Van Gogh Cake:
Medical afflictions-
The following is a short story by the American novelist and short story writer Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941). It was included in The Best American Short Stories of the Century (John Updike-Editor)
“I am in love with my wife,” he said–a superfluous remark, as I had
not questioned his attachment to the woman he had married. We walked
for ten minutes and then he said it again. I turned to look at him. He
began to talk and told me the tale I am now about to set down.
01-02 The Other Woman – Sherwood Anderson
(click on above to download audio book/ short story of
The Other Woman by Sherwood Anderson)
Click below for full size-
Little Lulu cartoon: Chick and Double Chick
The Great War caricature map- click for full–
Greek Myths- click 4 big
updated classic-
Listen up, settle down, chill out
Filed under animated gif, animation, comedy relief, Free Audio Books, pictures, silly
click for full size
No reason. No theme. Just pictures; some move; click for full size especially if the picture appears to be unrecognizable or doesn’t animate, etc.
Filed under animated gif, animation, cats, comedy relief, kittens, pictures, Uncategorized
Getting the announcement part out of the way, tonight is Mad Liberation by Moonlight at 1 a.m. PST on KBOO, 90.7 FM in Portland, Oregon. Streamed on the web at http://www.kboo.fm/. It’s a call in show, blah blah blah, call in at 503-231-8187 to be on the radio, read other posts about it here. Archived shows are found on the MLBM tab above.
Always remember- click pics for full size; most are really big.
West on the Springwater Corridor trail near my home- On the left (south side) is a marsh. On the right (north) are a series of ditches that collect water and keep it for a bit until mid June or so. This is one of several places I monitor for amphibian eggs and relative potential for supporting polliwogs through their transformations.
Marsh on south side of Springwater Corridor
Picture with hard-to-see newt tadpoles as of last week
The marshy area stays pretty moist and frogs that spawn there can expect their babies to grow up unless they’re eaten by birds or some such. The ditchy area is iffy. Eggs there will hatch- the ditch pools will fill with tadpoles- but the puddles will mostly dry up before the frogs can mature.
Lots of froggy love goin on- look at all that slimy frog spawn!
The marshy area also has a healthy population of newts- gilled newts that look like this as they are changing:
The frogs I’m talking about are basic pacific tree frogs. They are brown to green ion color and start out very small and stay just a bit bigger. The newly transformed froglings will be about the size of your thumbnail. Or smaller. Fully grown, 1 or 2 years old they may be the size of your thumb. This presupposes that they survive tadpole-hood.
Babies look like this when they mature:
Hey little fella/ gal/ whatever you are
More frog eggs
The ditch puddles are still quite moist. Too wet and muddy around the edges for me to get close enough for you to see the tadpoles. But they are there- here’s a picture I took last year of one I brought home to mature:
Newts also spawn in these ditches and most don’t survive. I’ll get some of them, too. With the newts, I have to take them back out to a place like the marsh when they’re ready.
Almost ready to leave the tank (last year)
The frogs just hop out into the world. Usually 90% of them will take off in one day from the tank on my back porch.
More spawn
My annual hobby/ mission involves finding places like this that serve as marginal habitat- attractive to frogs in love (blush) but generally not capable of sustaining their babies. I find several spots near home. Powell Butte is one of my favorites but the marginal ditch I find them is messed up this year due to construction of an underground water reservoir.
This is a picture from Powell Butte, pre-reservoir.
Powell Butte from SPACE!
I work at Oregon State Hospital (OSH) in Salem, OR. It exists because in Oregon as well as most everywhere else, there is an assumption in the legal system (in society in general) that the people who have a mental health diagnosis are more prone to violence than others. This assumption is reflected in the functioning of the Psychiatric Security Review Board (PSRB), the primary instrument of oppression of those with a mental health diagnosis in this state. This is a direct opposite to reality/ evidence. (See also reports here and here and here. Or here– or even here.)
The best research available is the The MacArthur Community Violence Study, a gigantic longitudinal project spanning several years and thousands of people. This study included 1,136 male and female civil patients between 18 and 40 years old. The project monitored violence to others every 10 weeks during their first year after discharge from a mental institution. Patient self-reports were augmented by reports from collaterals and by police and hospital records. The comparison group consisted of 519 people living in the neighborhoods in which the patients resided after hospital discharge. They were interviewed once about violence in the past 10 weeks.
The most comprehensive study ever done regarding mental health and risk of violence found that even among the “mentally ill” who commit violent crimes, the likelihood of that person committing further violence is considerably less than an individual who has no mental health diagnosis. For individuals who simply have a mental health diagnosis, the likelihood that they will commit an act of violence is substantially less than the average person.
(The MacArthur study is so named because major funding was provided by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Research Network on Mental Health and the Law with a supplemental grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (grant # R01 49696) to interview the collateral informants.)
One factor is that many people who have behaviors labeled as mental illness have developed these symptoms as a result of (and a coping mechanism for) being victims of violence. Having a “mental illness” actually conveys a certain degree of immunity from any tendency towards violence.
The one variable that really messes up this finding is substance abuse. People who have both “mental illness” and active substance abuse are more likely to commit violent crimes.
Judging risk of violence by public opinion is as worthwhile as using your horoscope
It would make sense that if people have adequate support in their community they would be less likely to use alcohol or street drugs to self-medicate. In this way the mental health system as it exists in the United States today contributes to violence.
So- I propose that Oregon do the following:
Meanwhile, I won’t hold my breath. The public perception of those of us with “mental illness” is such that fear over-rides sense. A inmate escaping from the State Prison merits 2 inches of news space on page 6. A patient who leaves OSH (“absconds”) without PSRB permission is front page, lead story and a week of prominent follow-up articles.
Filed under Mental Hell Treatment, wellness and systems change
The winner:
Filed under animated gif, animation, cats, comedy relief, kittens, pictures
At the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) you may have heard they are looking for the particle called the Higgs-Boson. This particle is predicted by the Standard Model in particle physics. It is the only particle predicted in the Standard Model which has not been observed in experiments up to the present day. The LHC is not alone. The particle accelerator, Tevatron, at Fermilab, has also been looking for the Higgs-Boson but at lower energy levels than those at LHC. The Higgs-Boson, if found, will help explain the reason particles have mass.
What you may not have heard about is the experiment at LHCb. This massive experiment-
is not about mass– it sets out to investigate what happened prior to 1 second after the big bang.
CERN describes the experiment for laymen saying-
Fourteen billion years ago, the Universe began with a bang. Crammed within an infinitely small space, energy coalesced to form equal quantities of matter and antimatter. But as the Universe cooled and expanded, its composition changed. Just one second after the Big Bang, antimatter had all but disappeared, leaving matter to form everything that we see around us — from the stars and galaxies, to the Earth and all life that it supports.
An important step along the way is finding the particle called “Strange Beauty”, composed of a quark and an anti-quark. This has been accomplished as of May 7th, 2010. The LHCb physicists have collected about 10 million proton-proton collisions in order to find this first Beauty Particle. The reconstruction of each event is not easy, there are about 100 particle tracks reconstructed in this event.
Filed under Uncategorized
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