Tuesday, July 31, 2012

The Four Workmen of the Apoplexy




Stephen King's novella, "Stationary Bike" is about a man named Richard Sifkitz who goes to the doctor to check out his cholesterol levels. He discovers that they are too high, and his doctor tries to describe his high cholesterol levels with a metaphorical scenario of workmen clearing off junk foods on the roads of his arteries. Richard becomes obsessed with this idea.


So, Richard, an artist, buys a stationary bike in order to lose weight. He sets it up in his basement, and he actually uses it all the time. On the blank wall in front of him, Richard puts a map of the United States, imagining where he travels with every mile he pedals. As he continues to daydream on his bike, he decides to paint a mural of these metaphorical workmen that his doctor described to him. He pains four workmen clearing fat off of a road. However, the mural starts to come to life.


When he rides, he enters a trance where he actually enters his mural. When he sleeps, he dreams of the workmen. One of the workmen enters his dream which inspires him to paint his garage. However, when he paints the garage, he discovers that this workman has hung himself. Richard realizes how serious this is all getting, so he decides to dismantle the stationary bike.

Richard parallels drug addiction to his addiction to this stationary bike. He tries to make his addiction to riding it to be less than that of someone addicted to drugs. He ponders the idea of doing the drug or the addiction that "one last time," thinking that drug addicts say it all the time and don't mean it, but he is somehow stronger and really can do it one last time. In any event, his one last time is the most intense and really does become the last time.


He interacts with the workmen in the mural who are angry that Richard has led to the death of their friend. Since they've cleaned up all the fat in the streets, they no longer have work. Their lives are ruined. Richard tries to tell them that they are all imaginary, but their comebacks seem to make him think otherwise. He tries to take one of their hats with him almost as a test. He wonders if it was all a dream.


How it ends: Richard receives a hat in the mail that says LIPIDS on it, affirming that the mural, perhaps, was real.  Or just messing with his head.


Sabian Symbol Gemini 17: The head of health dissolved into the head of mentality.

Saponification


image source musingforamusement

Jung famously declared in 1929 that the ‘gods have become diseases’. He meant by this that the archetypal forces that govern our lives have so thoroughly been suppressed or ignored by modern reason that they have nowhere else to go but to appear in distorted form in symptoms, psychosomatic disorders and physical afflictions.


As in Jung’s day, in the early to mid 20th century, the gods are still off the official radar and most of us today do not ‘believe’ in the gods. They are as much banished from official consciousness today as they were in the time of Nietzsche, Freud or Jung. But as Jung might say, we don’t have to believe in the gods, because they have taken possession of us unconsciously. They do not require our belief to maintain their existence, because if we ignore them they simply move into our lives and take over, granting us less personal freedom than before. This is one of the big themes in media and cinema texts today. We consider ourselves to be free agents, secular persons in a free society, but this is a mere illusion or veneer which masks the fact that we are entirely conditioned by forces we do not see and over which we have no control.


Hitting bottom isn't a weekend retreat. It's not a goddamn seminar. Stop trying to control everything and just let go! LET GO!



In this regard, cinema, media and popular culture generally have served us well in recent times. These popular forms of expressions simply ignore high culture’s insistence that God is dead and the gods are no more, and they tell a very different story about our lives. Our lives are literally shot through with mythic themes, motifs, cosmologies, and archetypal patterns that suggest that, far from being dead, the gods are having a field day at our expense. The prevalence of myth in contemporary movies and media productions is too great to be ignored.


As Nietzsche said in 1872: we are starved of myth today, and we are prepared to seek it out wherever and whenever can:
And here stands modern man, stripped of myth, eternally starving, in the midst of all the past ages, digging and scrabbling for roots, even if he must dig for them in the most remote antiquities. What is indicated by the great historical need of unsatisfied modern culture, clutching about for countless other cultures, with its consuming desire for knowledge, if not the loss of myth, the loss of the mythical home, the mythical womb?

(Nietzsche 1872: 109-10)
Nietzsche, Friedrich 1872: The Birth of Tragedy. Trans Shaun Whiteside. London: Penguin, 1993.


The modern hunger for myth suggests that our instinctive nature is filling in for what our minds reject. Our minds continue to call myth crap, but we must have our regular fix of the mythic diet. We are at war with ourselves in this regard, and I would describe this as a conscious aversion for gods and myths, versus an unconscious addiction to these same realities.

Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.



Work cited The Gods Have Become Movies, LaTrobe University, 18 May 2010
Dr David Tacey has written extensively on religion, health and society. His most recent book in this field is Gods and Diseases: Making Sense of Our Physical and Mental Wellbeing (Sydney: Harper Collins, 2011).

David is Reader and Associate Professor at La Trobe University, Melbourne, where he teaches courses on the crisis of meaning in Western culture, Jung's cultural psychology, literature and postmodern theory. He is the author of twelve books, including Edge of the Sacred (Daimon, 2009), ReEnchantment: the new Australian Spirituality (Harper Collins, 2000), and The Spirituality Revolution (Harper Collins, 2003).

Monday, July 30, 2012

Nessus: Envy and Self-Sabotage


Prague School, late 16th Century
The centaur Nessus, pierced by Hercules' arrow, carrying Deianira across the river Evenus
traces of black chalk, bodycolor heightened with gold on vellum
Image carried away from Christies



In astrological circles, I feel that the Centaur asteroid Nessus is too easily pigeon-holed as "The Abuser's Asteroid".  The mythology is foreshore black-and-white cut-and-dried and a slam-dunk: Nessus is a Bad, Bad, Horsey.


One thing I have learned to appreciate with ye olde mythologies -  and to delve deeply for -  are their subtle nuances; which you don't get if you are content with being spoon-fed other people's interpretations. I always encourage students of astrology to hit up the source material themselves and not accept willy-nilly whatever bastard blend of myth/astrology is being served up.  I was a student of Joe Campbell's long before I trip-trapped my way across the bridge to the cookbooks of astrology.  Methinks we are overdue for a bonfire of the vanities! 


 Carl Jung, that pioneer of the transpersonal, wrote:


The archetypes themselves are forms, without content of their own, that serve to organize or channel psychological material. They are somewhat like dry stream beds whose shape determines the characteristics of a river once water begins flowing through them. The archetypes are carriers of energy. When an archetype is activated, it generally unlocks a tremendous amount of energy. All creativity has an archetypal element.



It is vitally important that students of asteroidal astrology do their own legwork, for sometimes that dry stream bed can turn into an abyss the size of the Grand Canyon.  And then you're stuffed because only mules can get down the canyon and you could be cooling your heels for sometime before a dude riding an ass turns up.


Envy and self-sabotage.  That's a pretty heavy load to carry through life and humans learn from early childhood to want what they can't have and to take from others what they want.  Or to give that a good try until they are standing before a Magistrate for petty theft.  Nessus is kind of a 'troubled teen' energy and the whole juvenile delinquent thing was a contrived concept developed in the 1940s.


Nessus is everywhere and cantering through Aquarius.  Don't believe me?  Don't take my word for it either. 


The next time you go to the supermarket, find a mother pushing a shopping trolley with a toddler sitting in it, who is red-in-the-face and screaming blue-murder because its desire has been thwarted.  You tell me that product placements aren't designed to evoke envy in the poor of those with money to burn, or to self-sabotage those who are on diets or restricted by health reasons in what they can eat.
Do not be fooled: this is not greed. That is too simple a ratiocination.


O yes indeedy, it is a brave New World shoppers!  




New World Supermarket, Waikanae, New Zealand



What To Do When Things Get Nasty
by Annemarie Cross

Tall poppy syndrome is well and truly alive.


For those of you who may not be familiar with this saying, Wikipedia describes the tall poppy syndrome as: “a social phenomenon in which people of genuine merit are resented, attacked, cut down, or criticised because their talents or achievements elevate them above or distinguish them from their peers”.


As you continue to grow your business and increase your credibility and reputation within your field, not only will you capture the attention of your potential prospect/clients – you’ll also be noticed by your competitors and other people in your circle.


And, unfortunately, some of these people may not always have your best interests at heart. In fact, you may find that they try to hinder your progress through a direct attack on you personally and your work, or they’ll try to drag you down with their critical (naysayer) comments and/or actions.
I’m not talking about constructive criticism where someone is trying to offer you advice with good intentions because they want to see you grow and prosper.


I’m referring to the vindictive comments that are coming from a place of ‘do or die competitiveness’ or out of spite and envy with the sole intent on tarnishing your credibility or keeping you down.
read more


I currently have Black Moon Lilith piggy-back transit conjunct natal Nessus. What can I say? Hi-Ho silver and lock me away........I'm channeling the Queen of Mean.  In combination with a Hades Moon in Capricorn....tee hee.... I'm loaded for bear.  My appointment this coming Tuesday morning with Social Security may yield a spiritually advantageous moment to deliver a kick in the astral.


Further Reading

Envy and Self-Sabotage - Joseph Burgo Ph.D.

Basic Shame, Toxic Shame - Joseph Burgo Ph.D.
It is the awareness of being damaged, often an unconscious awareness, that I refer to as basic shame. It is intrinsic and internal, though we may confuse it with the outside world: those of us who are troubled by basic shame dread being seen and usually fear that others will look down upon us. We feel as if we are “ugly” or “deformed”. We may be burdened by a feeling of self-hatred throughout our lives.

Defenses Against Shame - Joseph Burgo Ph.D.
Narcissism is the primary defense against shame and often goes hand-in-hand with the other two defenses. When people suffer from an unbearable sense of shame, they often seek to elicit admiration from the outside, as if to deny the internal damage. Beautiful outside versus ugly inside. We’ve all known such narcissistic types. 

The Gift of Seven Extraordinary Days of Grace - Caroline Myss
Grace comes in many expressions. It intervenes in raging arguments, calming your anger so that you do not say what you can never take back. Grace whispers thoughts of hope in desperate times, giving you the stamina to hold on through the storms of life. And grace delivers inspiration, awakening creative resources deep within your being. The power of grace is endless, silent, and powerful.

Sunday, July 29, 2012

Sleeping With the Anomie



Hermann Hesse's Der Steppenwolf expresses a picture of anomie.

The novel tells the story of a middle-aged man named Harry Haller who is beset with reflections on his being ill-suited for the world of "everybody", the regular people. In his aimless wanderings about the city he is given a book which describes the two natures of man: one "high", spiritual and "human"; while the other is "low" and animal-like.


Thus, man is entangled in an irresolvable struggle, never content with either nature because he cannot see beyond this self-made construct. While Haller longs to live free from social convention, he continually lives as a bourgeois bachelor.


Haller argues that the men of the Dark Ages did not suffer more than those of  Classical Antiquity,  and vice-versa. It is rather those who live between two times, those who do not know what to follow, that suffer the most. In this token, a man from the Dark Ages living in Classical Antiquity, or the opposite, would undergo a gulping sadness and agony.

Monday, July 23, 2012

Jumping Jehoshaphat!


The “Human Monsters” from Conrad von Magenberg’s “Buch der Natur”, Augsburg, 1475. In the bottom row, the third woman from the left has an elongated sack hanging from the mandible region.                                   


In the fourteenth century, astronomy was by far the most advanced branch of systematised scientific knowledge. For students of the stars, totally at a loss to explain what was happening around them, it was only natural to extrapolate desperately from what they understood and seek to compose from the movement of the planets some code of rules which would interpret and give warnings of events on earth.


"The medieval cosmic outlook," wrote Dr. C. Singer, "cannot be understood unless it is realized, that analogy pushed to extreme lengths, unchecked by observation and experiment, was the major intellectual weapon of the age'.


Astrology, that arcane compound of astronomical research and semi-magical crystal-gazing, was near the peak of its prestige in the fourteenth century.  It was the Arab astronomers who had evolved the theory that the movements of the planets and their relationship to each other in space dictated the future of humanity.  Since the Black Death was clearly far out of the normal, some abnormal behaviour on the part of the planets had to be found to explain it.


Various theories were propounded from time to time but the classic exposition was that laid down by the Medical Faculty of the University of Paris in the report prepared on the orders of King Philip IV in 1348.


On 20 March, 1345, at 1pm, there occurred a conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter and Mars in the house of Aquarius.  The conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter notoriously caused death and disaster while the conjunction of Mars and Jupiter spread pestilence in the air (Jupiter, being warm and humid, was calculated to draw up evil vapours from the earth and water which Mars, hot and dry, then kindled into infective fire).  Obviously the conjunction of all three planets could only mean an epidemic of cataclysmic scale.


remains of 14th century plague deaths
Thornton Abbey, Lincolnshire.

The doctrine that the movement of the planets was the force which set the Black Death in motion was never overtly challenged except by Konrade of Megenberg who argued that no planetary conjunction lasted for more than two years and that therefore, since the plague persisted longer, it must necessarily have had some other cause.  Besides, he pointed out, all movements of celestial bodies were subject to strict order while the plague was patently haphazard in its action.  Among a few other writers, however, a certain skepticism can be detected or, perhaps more correctly, an indifference to remote causes which were not susceptible of proof and were anyhow beyond the power of men to mend.


Gentile da Foligno referred to the planets in general terms and then went on...."It must be believed that, whatever may be the case with regard to the aforesaid causes, the immediate and particular cause is a certain poisonous material which is generated about the heart and lungs".  The job of the doctor, he concluded, was not to worry about the heavens but to concentrate on the symptoms of the sick and to do what he could to cure them.


Such admirable common sense was the exception. The European, in the face of the Black Death, was in general overwhelmed by a sense of inevitable doom.  If the plague was decreed by God and the inexorable movement of the planets, then how could frail man seek to oppose it?  The preacher might counsel hope, but only with the proviso that the sins of man must first be washed away by the immensity of his suffering.  The doctor might prescribe remedies, but with the tepid enthusiasm of a civil-defence expert advising those threatened by imminent nuclear attack to adopt a crouching posture and clasp their hands behind their necks.



Jehoshaphat Aspin, designed whimsical astronomy cards in the early 19th century.


The Black Death descended on a people who were drilled by their theological and their scientific training into a reaction of apathy and fatalistic resignation.  Nothing could have provided more promising material on which a plague might feed.


Work cited Ziegler, Philip The Black Death, 1969
Photograph by Ian Goldby

Sunday, July 22, 2012

Gemini 3: The Garden of the Tuileries


Lion Monument, Lucerne, Switzerland


Near the village
The peaceful village
The lion sleeps tonight
Near the village
The quiet village
The lion sleeps tonight


"For more than 500 years, young Swiss men went out into the world in a controlled military environment at an age when they are quite naturally a little wild," said Anselm Zurfluh, director of Geneva's Museum of Swiss in the World. "They usually returned calmed down and wanting to work, settle down and have families. I firmly believe this is one reason Switzerland is so peaceful." 


The most famous episode in the history of the Swiss Guards was their defence of the Tuileries Palace  in central Paris during the French Revolution.  Of the nine hundred Swiss Guards defending the Palace on August 10, 1792,  about six hundred were killed during the fighting or massacred after surrender. One group of sixty Swiss were taken as prisoners to the Paris City Hall before being killed by the crowd there.

 An estimated hundred and sixty more died in prison of their wounds, or were killed during the September Massacres that followed. Apart from fewer than a hundred Swiss who escaped from the Tuileries, some hidden by sympathetic Parisians, the only survivors of the regiment were a three-hundred-strong detachment which had been sent to Normandy to escort grain convoys a few days before August 10th. 

The Swiss officers were mostly amongst those massacred, although Major Karl Josef von Bachmann  in command at the Tuileries was formally tried and guillotined in September, still wearing his red uniform coat.

Two Swiss officers, the captains Henri de Salis and Joseph Zimmermann, did however survive and went on to reach senior rank under Napoleon and the Restoration.


Linda Koelbel's persian cat, Rascal, sleeping



The Swiss guards so beloved by tourists at the gates of Vatican City are the most colourful remnant of a mercenary tradition that goes back 700 years. But the tradition may be seeing a controversial 21st-century revival in the form of private security guards in conflict zones. [read more]



"Ja. Three cheeseburgers"


Hush, my darling
Don't fear my darling
The lion sleeps tonight
Hush, my darling
Don't fear my darling
The lion sleeps tonight


Saturday, July 21, 2012

4,003,221 Tears From Now


Gabriel's Gully, New Zealand

At a place where a kind of road crossed on a shallow bar I shovelled away about two and a half feet of gravel, arrived at a beautiful soft slate and saw the gold shining like the stars in Orion on a dark frosty night" ~ Gabriel Read, 1861


On a late autumn evening in 1861, when the infant village of Dunedin was at its evening meal and the dark already falling, a lone Australian prospector stopped to try his luck at a small creek 70km away as the crow flies.
The man was Gabriel Read. The place, a few kilometres from modern Lawrence. The date, the 20th (some say the 23rd) of May. Shovelling away more than half a metre of gravel and reaching the slate bed of the creek, Read found, in his famous phrase, "gold shining like the stars of Orion on a dark, frosty night". By the time he had panned out the first shovelsful and with darkness already upon him, he had to stumble back to his tent to strike a light and see the rich residue of gold gleaming in the dish.




In Norse mythology, Freya was said to cry tears of pure gold.


Photograph Gabriel's Gully sourced from Spring Pictures
Gold Tears painting by Paul Tokarski sourced from Fine Art America

Thursday, July 19, 2012

Ko tona mea nui he tapu.



A prominent Catholic priest and theologian has been exposed as a self-confessed paedophile, who was quietly placed on a sex offenders programme by the church and is suspected of having abused dozens of children for decades.The Herald can reveal Father Michael Shirres, who had lectured in Māori theology at the University of Auckland and wrote several books on Māori spirituality, confessed to sexually abusing a young girl and is suspected of abusing many other victims.The Catholic church has confirmed it received five complaints against Shirres and placed him in a programme for sex offenders. Another victim says a therapist told her Shirres admitted to abusing dozens of children.  ~ Winter of 2018







"His greatest possession is his tapu".

Michael Shirres, born at Timaru, New Zealand on 12 July 1929, was a Dominican brother who worked for over twenty years with Maori elders on the the inculturation of Christianity and Christ into the cosmology of the Maori : mauritanga.


Brother Michael passed away on 5 October 1997 after being companioned through the last three years of his life by Progressive Bulbar Palsy, a form of Motor Neurone Disease (ALS): a terminal disease for which there is no known cure.


One of Brother Michael's legacies is his website on Maori Theology which would appeal to the serious scholar of Polynesian cosmology.     Website returns 404 Error.


In his lifetime, Brother Michael made the fullest attempt to define and redefine concepts from pakeha Christian theology and Polynesian cosmology, and in doing so weaved what Theologian John Charlot entitled:  The Maori-Christian Theology of Michael Shirres.


An organisation that offers therapy to child sex abusers says more needs to be done by organisations referring clients to them to dismantle their own cultures of secrecy and silence.

"It is one skeleton I didn't expect to come out of the closet."
The nephew said he was glad his own mother had died not knowing what Shirres had done. Shirres' brother, John, had also died about five years ago.
"I don't believe his own brother had any idea of what his brother had done," he said.

Father Walsh released a statement to Catholic media last month expressing ''deep sorrow and heartfelt apology to those who have suffered, and continue to suffer, because of Michael Shirres' actions."

Hinepūkohurangi: Woman of the Mist


Jupiter and Io c. 1532 by Antonia Allegri Correggio


In traditional Māori belief there is something beyond the world of everyday experience: we do not live in a closed system where what we see is all there is. This other world or dimension is known as Te Kore, the ‘void’, in most tribal traditions.


Cleve Barlow has suggested that Te Kore means chaos – a state which has always existed and which contains ‘unlimited potential for being’. Māori Marsden, a Tai Tokerau elder and Anglican minister, had a similar belief. He said that Te Korekore (a variant of Te Kore) was ‘the realm between non-being and being: that is the realm of potential being.’


Some believe that Te Kore is where the ultimate reality can be found. Others think that it is where Io, the Supreme Being, dwells. The idea of Te Kore is central to notions of mana (status), tapu (sacred and restricted customs) and mauri (life force).

Until the arrival of Europeans in the late 1700s, Māori held a world view that originated in their Polynesian homeland. This grew and changed according to life in the new land. The Polynesian influence is still widely evident, although it is challenged by some.

Some iwi (tribes) hold that their ancestors did not come from over the sea, but sprang from the New Zealand landscape.

For example, the Ngāi Tūhoe people claim that their ancestor is Hinepūkohurangi, the mist that dwells in the valleys of the Urewera Ranges.



Hinepukohurangi over Lake Tekapo




Cited Works:
Te Ahukaramū Charles Royal. 'Te Ao Mārama – the natural world - The world of light and darkness', Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, updated 1-Mar-09
URL: http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/te-ao-marama-the-natural-world/3                     

Landscape image sourced from Waitaha

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Yeah but we get to wear a right nice gear that pulls the chicks....




The Romans had a crazy idea. They wanted to make the World Roman. The amazing thing was they actually gave it a pretty good try. Of all of Rome’s achievements the Roman Army was one of the greatest. Every soldier had four basic jobs to do.
The first is obvious, conquering, he is trained to fight and kill just as every soldier is.

The second job is fairly straightforward as well. Once you have conquered your enemy you must control them, so the Army also acted as a “police” force in every territory they controlled.

The third job is the interesting one, Having smashed the enemies country to bits the Army will then start to rebuild it. Not as it was, but in the style of Rome, roads, towns, cities, baths, temples, arenas the lot, and it’s not just for the Romans it’s for everyone to use.

The last job is to patrol the borders to stop anyone else from causing trouble.[1]







How Poor Kids are Made to Fight Wars for the Rich

by Chris Hedges, Boston Review


We condition the poor and the working class to go to war. We promise them honor, status,
glory, and adventure. We promise boys they will become men. We hold these promises up
against the dead-end jobs of small-town life, the financial dislocations, credit card debt, bad marriages, lack of health insurance, and dread of unemployment. The military is the call
of the Sirens, the enticement that has for generations seduced young Americans working
in fast food restaurants or behind the counters of Walmarts to fight and die for war profiteers
and elites.
I learned at an early age that when the poor fall no one picks them up, while the rich
stumble and trip their way to the top.                    
Click to read more How Poor Kids Are Made to Fight Wars for the Rich




Image of Bear River Tom Smith (1838-1870)
Frontierado is about the myth of the American west, not the grinding reality.
Read about four forgotten gunslingers with cool names at Balladeer's Blog




Image and text on Roman Army Life snitched from Lore-and-Saga UK
Image of Bear River Tom rustled from Balladeer's Blog

Thursday, July 12, 2012

Six of One; Half Dozen of the Other







Ninety-six college women who attended a small private liberal arts college on the east coast responded to The Adjective Check List, ACL, (Gough, 1952) employed in this study to measure Assertiveness, Relational Needs, Cognitive Ego States and Negative Self-Image. In addition the women responded to the father-daughter questionnaire, a questionnaire designed by the author to identify specific father-daughter relationships. Results showed that the women's responses to the Father-Daughter questionnaire identified six distinct father-daughter. relationships: a doting father; a distant father; a demanding/supportive father; a domineering father; a seductive father; an absent father. ~ Merlino-Perkins



Work cited:  Rose Merlino Perkins "The father-daughter relationship: familial interactions that impact a daughter's style of life". College Student Journal. FindArticles.com. 11 Jul, 2012

Baseball hard-hitter Harmon Killebrew tells a story that hints at the importance of fathers to boys: “My father used to play with my brother and me in the yard,” he says on his Web site. “Mother would come out and say, ‘You’re tearing up the grass.’ ‘We’re not raising grass,’ Dad would reply. ‘We’re raising boys.’”

Obviously, Killebrew’s father was tuned in to the needs of his sons, an admirable quality that seems only natural in a man. We accept that every boy needs a father as easily as we accept the notion that he needs a dog. But while society is beginning to acknowledge that a father is more crucial than a dog to a boy’s well-being, the question of how important fathers are to the well-being of their daughters has all but been ignored.

Work cited: Like Father, Like Daughter? Gina Stepp, Vision.org






Linda Nielsen, interviewed recently by Vision's Gina Stepp, is a psychologist and professor of adolescent psychology and women's studies at Wake Forest University in North Carolina.  The interview between Nielsen and Stepp can be read here: The Lost Relationship: Fathers and Daughters.


When life gives you a wedge of lemon, you suck on that and extract whatever you can. Lemonade is a luxury for folks with time and a pitcher. ~ The Busy Dad Blog


When life hands you lemons: squirt lemon juice in the eye of your enemy! ~ Anonymouse 

The Seen and the Hidden


Everybody has their own way of doing things, and this just happens to be the system I like.


 For more ideas about how to DYI an Earth Treasure Vase, the Digital Tibetan Buddhist offers some practical guidance.  My sense is that repurposing pre-loved vases purchased inexpensively from Thrift Stores would be most acceptable.  The less farting about with vanities of ritual; the better.


The Seen and the Hidden: (Dis)covering the Veil - Islam, West and Identity: the Veil is sitting at the crossroads: it is provocative, as it let you discover that they belong to an alien (presumably hostile) culture while covering what that culture really is. It is viewed by us as a symbol of oppression; for them it is a symbol of identity: you are not from nowhere; you came from a place; you are not nameless; you have your own name; you came to the West as an equal. [Above image of a clever beehive storage design for scarves, veils and knickers]





Her Majesty the Druk Gyaltsuen Jetsun Pema Wangchuk,
Queen of the Kingdom of Bhutan.

On Protecting Nyingma: On May fifteenth this year, during the course of a spontaneous teaching at Half Moon Bay, California, Gyatrul Rinpoche made the following observation:

"We are trying to help sentient beings. At the same time we need to protect ourselves, protect the center. What does that mean? It means that we need to guard our merit. That is how we protect ourselves. And we need to protect the center from waste and carelessness. You shouldn't think, 'This belongs to the center, let's use it now, use it up.' Instead, you should think, 'I need to protect the center. I need to guard my merit. We need to keep, protect, save, use everything carefully.' Everybody needs to take care of the center. Young or old, smart or dumb, scholar or non-scholar, rich or poor, pretty or handsome or ugly like me, it doesn't matter... ." [saddle up]

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Thangka. Thangka Very Much.


Crevasse, Franz Josef, New Zealand



In the Tibetan Buddhist pantheon, Yeshe Tsogyal appears on three levels: in a physically embodied, historical, human form (nirmanakaya), she appears as the princess of Karchen, Yeshe Tsogyal, a queen of Tibet. In a visionary, symbolic body (sambhogakaya), she is known as Vajrayogini, one of the most important female yidams (deities used as a support for meditation) of Tibetan Buddhism, practiced as a Vajrayana ritual in the Shambhala Buddhist lineage. In her most subtle, formless essence of open space aspect (dharmakaya), she is Samantabhadri, the female side of the primordial Buddha Samantabhadra, the essence of basic goodness, the direct nature of mind, and ultimate source of the lineage in Nyingma Buddhism.[1]



Yeshe Tsogyal, artist Ang Tsherin Sherpa

Supplication to Yeshe Tsogyal

Mother of all the victorious ones, dharmadhatu samantabhadri,
Very kind, only mother who protects the subjects of Tibet,
Bestower of supreme siddhi, chief among the dakinis of great bliss,
Yeshe Tsogyal, we supplicate at your feet.

Grant your blessings so that outer, inner, and secret obstacles may be pacified.
Grant your blessings so that the lives of the gurus may be long.
Grant your blessings so that this kalpa of disease, famine, and war may be pacified.
Grant your blessings so that the casting of curses, spells, and sorcery may be pacified.
Grant your blessings so that life, glory, and prajña¥ may increase.
Grant your blessings so that our wishes may be fulfilled spontaneously.


This was written by Khakhyap Dorje [Karmapa XV], the boy nurtured by the jñanadakinis. May virtue and goodness increase! Translated by the Vajravairochana Translation Committee, used with permission.


Cynthia Jurs with Earth Treasure Vase in ceremony in Alaska

 

The Story of the Earth Treasure Vase Mandala

by Cynthia Jurs

In 1990, I was invited by my vajra brother, Jim Casilio, to join a small group trek into the Solu-Khumbu region of Nepal on a pilgrimage to meet a 106-year-old Tibetan Lama, H.E. Kushok Mangden, Charok Rinpoche, a hermit who lived in a cave high in the Himalayas. Charok Rinpoche was the guiding teacher and root guru of a Sherpa friend, Lama Ngawang Tsultrim Zangpo, who served as our guide into the mountains to meet the venerable Rinpoche. As I walked along the path day after day, I contemplated what to ask this ancient holy person that would be of benefit not just to me, but to others as well. [click to read most fascinating story]



Notilia

[1] Yeshe Tsogyal: Woman and Feminine Priniciple - Rita Gross & Acharya Judith Simmer Brown. Published Shambhala Times, August 2009.


Photograph of crevasse taken by Antoniak and swiped from Travelpod. Want more ice?

 Thangka Art
Ang Tsherin Sherpa was born in 1968 in Kathmandu, Nepal. He started studying thangka painting at the age of twelve under the skillful guidance of his father, Master Urgen Dorje, a renowned thangka artist from Ngyalam, Tibet. After six years of intense formal training, Tsherin went to Taiwan to study Mandarin and computer science. Three years later, he returned to Nepal and resumed working with his father in numerous projects that included painting thangkas and monastery murals.
Tsherin came to the US in 1998 and worked as a thangka artist and as an instructor at The Healing Buddha Center in California. Presently, he lives in Oakland, California where he continues to paint thangkas and to offer classes in thangka painting.

Hungry Vanity


The Devil sculpture in the Tarot Garden of Niki de Saint Phalle in Italy


When I was a kid, growing up under the cruel indifferences and compensatory faux caring of a mother diagnosed with manic depression, her common dismissal and put-down of anybody (mostly me), anybody whom she perceived to not be gifted with the superior intelligence that she had in abundance; was to hiss-strike:  You know nothing!


It has taken me some twenty years to uncover just what a parochial short-sighted narrow-minded dumb ignorant small-town white-trash country hick my (thankfully) now dead mother was, and to map the co-ordinates of the mirror-world of denial and self-delusion that she preferred to inhabit.  It took a great deal of inner work on my part to cross the borders of that fantastical reflective world and to blow it off the topographical contours in my psyche.


I speak metaphorically, symbolically, mythopoetically because, frankly, any other language is not up to the task. In poker parlance, mundane language doesn't hold the nuts.


I managed to crack the nut that my mother was through examining the society and culture of her times, a process facilitated by pondering over astrological cycles and the recorded facts of history, shuttling back-and-forth through known genealogical lines, and allowing time to pass.  It has perhaps taken me 50 years to realize, to self-realize, that while I walked in the world of my batshit crazy mother; I was not of her world.  Having reclaimed my true citizenship, it became less treacherous to walk away from the mothershit.  That only took a nano-second.


In the late-Eighties, my mother had been the focus of an eminent body of specialists after her first cataract surgery went pear-shaped.  Her case now being a footnote in ophthalmic history. My concerns were more pragmatic and centered on the reality of the medical malpractice. I was very alert to the creeping freakshow vibe of an esteemed professional medical entity that was holding out a carrot-on-a-stick ~ 15 minutes of fame ~  to my mother.  This tasty treat had mother fizzing with self-importance and bubble-boasting to all and sundry about the "rarity of the surgical complication". 


She crowed that Very Distinguished and Important Doctors - not doctors - Misters, said she was special and would like to have her attend an Extraordinary Gathering so they could discuss her case.  Not being able to dissuade mother from her vainglorious path, I made sure that the Extraordinary Gentlemen covered all her costs - transportation to-and-from the venue with a restaurant lunch - or no show.

 
They did not expect this gullible sixtysomething widowed housewife from a working-class poor suburb to have a daughter who was a Medico-Legal Secretary and wise to the subtle nuances of these medical muck-up sideshows.  The Esteemed Company of Uh-Oh ensured that mother signed a contract that stripped her of the right to lodge a malpractice suit. She signed that document without reading it.


But mother didn't care about the fact that she now legally blind in one eye, that if the opthalmic surgeon had not deceived her and covered up his tracks for six months, that she could have had timely corrective surgery, and not lost as much vision.  The treachery of the first doctor was only uncovered after I took mother to another opthalmologist for a second opinion.  That doctor quickly judged the lay of the land and the fraternity of eye-doctors closed ranks to protect one of their own.


I had a series of discussions with mother, trying in vain, to raise her awareness of the issues. Attempting to blast though her obtuseness and know-it-all-ness and to give her a sense of how she was being lab-ratted by these specialists. That they were no different to the psychiatrists who performed experiments on her when she was resident at Royal Park and Larundel.


"No. No. You're wrong. You're wrong. You know nothing!  Don't interfere.  I know what I'm doing. Don't upset the doctors....you don't want to upset the doctors.  You know nothing!"


This was the point at which I considered getting legal guidance myself as to the processes I would need to follow to have mother declared mentally incompetent and be awarded guardianship.  It had been obvious for some years that her capacity to make appropriate choices was becoming more and more impaired.  Yet her siblings and friends were maintaining a stonewall of denial; not really wanting to look at issues of mental incompetency in a woman who had been a proxy-mother to them.
The irony of the quote, the one-eyed man in the valley of the blind is king, fits hand-in-glove as to the dynamics I observed my mother had with her....fans.


Mother kept me distracted on a daily basis with the consistency of her dramas and the constancy of feeling angry, frustrated, upset, mad on her behalf - me acting as the container for those traits she had exiled out of her fifedom of mirros.  In the Eighties,  I was adequately FOG-befuddled to not realize that if I had cared less about being villified as the classic 'bad daughter, terrible person', that the attainment of a Guardianship order would have safeguarded my future.  Simply: I would have had control over my physical and psychological welfare, present and future. My mother was then, and had always been, the sole threat on my safety and wellbeing.  I had the chance to take that power away from her. I stumbled in doing so because I had been sufficiently duped to believe that the worst thing I could be called was : a bad daughter.  To be seen as a money-grubber.


Perhaps it was vanity that stayed my hand.  Perhaps I just wasn't skilled enough then, as a shaman, to know how to take out the mother-knows-best propaganda and to permanently disable the radio station. 


Mother dined out on her 15 minutes of fame for years.   I think she tried to get a copy of the Very Serious Medical Journal in which her case appeared.  One of the Misters said that he would send her a copy of the paper although he never did: a narcissistic insult that mother whined about when she had stopped whining about everything else.


Vanity is said to be an important indicative in bipolar disorder: the excessive belief in one's own abilities or attractiveness to others.


Aren't we all full of ourselves in one way or another?  And where does blogging sit on this slithering scale what They consider to be excessive, moderate or sparse when it comes to the pathologizing of vanity.....


Tuesday, July 10, 2012

The Thousand-yard Touchdown.



At 6:30 a.m. on September 12th, 2001, in the rubble of Ground Zero, I saw a fireman sitting alone, looking into the distance with an unfocused gaze. This was a look I had seen before in war zones around the world, when someone’s life compass has been shaken so profoundly that all sense of direction has become confused. They call it the thousand-yard stare. As I made several photographs of this man he looked right through me, oblivious to my presence.[1]



The Story of the Magic Lantern

In 1841, the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane, later the Institute of the Pennsylvania Hospital, opened its doors headed by Dr. Thomas Story Kirkbride. Mental illness was not viewed in the same way as physical illness; difficult to treat at home, even the affluent sought institutionalization for mentally ill family members. Until the mid-1800s, confinement, not a cure, was the purpose. Physicians during the mid-nineteenth century no longer viewed mental illness as a spiritual possession, or demonic in nature; instead, insanity was understood as a clinical disease and could be cured.

A Quaker, Kirkbride practiced what was popularly known at the time as "moral treatment." At around the same time, the field of photography was on the rise, and provided Kirkbride with an innovative technique to assist patients in returning to society. Kirkbride believed images would provide stability for patients by providing a rational perception. As the audience, patients were part of "normal" social life and this allowed for rational patterns of brain activity to be exercised, supposedly bringing the patient back to mental health.

Using the new technology of the time, Kirkbride began his "magic lantern" shows to serve as both therapy and entertainment for patients. The magic lantern was an early form of slide projector, lit by candles initially, with slides manually inserted.

Slide shows took place in a specially designed room, with benches for visitors and a podium for the lantern. Guest lecturers would speak on various topics while images were projected. Two restrictions were made: patients were not allowed to be photographed, and "ghost" images were prohibited.[2]




On 20 July 1881, Sioux Indian leader Sitting Bull surrendered to federal troops.[4]




I was bruised and battered
And I couldn't tell what I felt
I was unrecognizable to myself
Saw my reflection in a window
I didn't know my own face

Oh brother are you gonna leave me wasting away
On the streets of Philadelphia

I walked the avenue till my legs felt like stone
I heard the voices of friends vanished and gone
At night I could hear the blood in my veins
Just as black and whispering as the rain
On the streets of Philadelphia

Ain't no angel gonna greet me
It's just you and I my friend
And my clothes don't fit me no more
I walked a thousand miles just to slip this skin

The night has fallen, I'm lyin' awake
I can feel myself fading away
So receive me brother with your faithless kiss
Or will we leave each other alone like this
On the streets of Philadelphia
[3]



Notilia

[1] To see a memorial portfolio of Peter's photographs, "Remembering 9/11," taken on September 11th and 12th, 2001, and the days following (including several never before published) please click here.

[2] Pennsylvania Hospital was founded in 1751 by Dr. Thomas Bond and Benjamin Franklin "to care for the sick-poor and insane who were wandering the streets of Philadelphia."

[3] Bruce Springsteen Streets of Philadelphia lyrics, written for the film Philadelphia (1993), the first mainstream film dealing with HIV/AIDS.

[4] The film now moves into its final and the most glorious set piece. What, in a lesser film, could have been simply an exercise in liberal white guilt is elevated into the realm of the unreal and the mythical: Bill’s King Lear-like descent into madness. Please click here.


"Cinema does not cry. Cinema does not comfort us. It is with us. It is us".
The Seventh Art.

Monday, July 9, 2012

The Lure of the Land


California orange orchard, 1905



'What made you go and work on the land?' I have so frequently been asked the question that perhaps an answer should be attempted. When a reason is completely obvious to oneself it is often difficult to explain it. Since 'because I very much wanted to' will not serve, I must be more explicit. While not refusing the term 'an intellectual' as applied to myself, since I believe in the Mind more than anything else, I had hitherto regarded the world too much from the outside, and I wished to become more involved in it. The war gave me the opportunity.


The previous war had left me as an Honorary Lieutenant in the Irish Guards, for it had stopped when I was at an Officer Cadet Battalion, and in 1940 I was offered an Army post. Since it was clear to me that I would be given some home job for which I should be entirely unfitted, I asked to be excused in favour of agriculture. This granted, I gained the opportunity of becoming thoroughly implicated in the fields instead of being merely a spectator of them. ~ J.S. Collis, Preface to The Worm Forgives te Plough, Vintage Classics, 2001


‘[E]levated, and pleasantly undulating and park-like; containing several excellent building sites, and a good proportion of excellent farmland.
This was the description of Mont Park Hospital for the Insane, a site of 1289 acres opened in 1911 on the outskirts of suburban Melbourne. The site, a former farm, was expansive. Some sense of the immensity of the land can be derived from correspondence files and newspaper reports. The accounts of a skeleton found in a hollow tree, or the disappearance of a patient in the undergrowth at dusk or the loss of thousands of trees in arson attacks, give an impression not only of acreage but of vast land, hardly the pleasant park-like estate of official reports. By 1948 the site housed an average of 1,528 patients and accommodation for staff across a number of buildings.
By 1999 as Mont Park was closing, it was labelled a ‘psychopolis’, a reference to the sprawl of buildings and institutions across the site which formed the public perception of the place as another world.
The size of the land in no small part contributed to this sense of Mont Park as an alien place. The trajectory of this site from bucolic ‘park-like’ setting, to extensive working farm to a surreal ‘psychopolis’, reveals attitudes not only to mental illness but to a particular view of ‘land’ and rural life central to the ‘Australian’ identity, in the period surrounding the first world war. Its history involves the treatment of ‘shell-shocked’ soldiers and the ‘chronic’ insane. This last category included not only people with conditions that are generally recognized as indicative of mental illness such as depression or delusions, but also more broad categories such as senile dementia, alcoholism, intellectual disability and syphilis. For this range of conditions, the rural life was considered the best management method. Of course, any paper dealing with asylums will naturally evoke the work of Foucault on asylums, particularly in critiques of the asylum as an ‘instrument of segregation’  and as ‘convenient places to get rid of inconvenient people.’

Works cited: The Lure of the Land: Mont Park Hospital for the Insane, Anne Bourke, University of Melbourne.

Ernest Borgnine: Dead by his Own Hand

Ernest in front of his Hollywood hills home in 1969



Eterno riposo, concedere a loro, o Signore,
e lasciare che perpetua risplenda ad essi la luce
Maggio le anime dei fedeli defunti
attraverso il ricordo di Dio, riposa in pace,



I was truly saddened to hear that Ernest Borgnine died today.  In truth, I was surprised he was still alive. 95 years and what a full and rich life.  I grew up watching McHale's Navy, it's inane plots and bog-Hollywood standard imbecility got on my yet-to-bloom tits!! I remember his finely nuanced performance in his decorated movie Martyr Marty. New York Times reviewer Bosley Crowther praised Borgnine’s performance as “a beautiful blend of the crude and the strangely gentle and sensitive in a monosyllabic man.”


Ernest always reminded me of my father.  Strikingly similar hairline, forehead furrows, gap-toothed grin, stocky muscular body and a call-it-as-I-see-it "man's man" penetrating burst-your-bubble take on life.

In August 2008, when asked what his secret to longevity was, Ernest replied: "I masturbate a lot". The satire in Ern's answer may have gone unnoticed:

From Wikipedia

Doctor John Harvey Kellogg was an especially zealous campaigner against masturbation. Kellogg was able to draw upon many medical sources' claims such as "neither the plague, nor war, nor small-pox, nor similar diseases, have produced results so disastrous to humanity as the pernicious habit of onanism," credited to one Dr Adam Clarke. 


 Kellogg strongly warned against the habit in his own words, claiming of masturbation-related deaths "such a victim literally dies by his own hand," among other condemnations.


Kellogg believed the practice of "solitary-vice" caused cancer of the womb, urinary diseases, nocturnal emissions, impotence, epilepsy, insanity, and mental and physical debility – "dimness of vision" was only briefly mentioned.


In Plain Facts for Old and Young, Kellogg issued a warning on the evils of sex. Of the 644 pages, 97 address "Secret Vice (Solitary Vice or Self-Abuse)", its symptoms and results. Included are 39 signs indicating someone is masturbating.


He recommended, to prevent children from this "solitary vice", bandaging or tying their hands, covering their genitals with patented cages, sewing the foreskin shut and electrical shock. He also recommended burning off the clitoris to prevent masturbation in girls. Kellogg promoted male circumcision to prevent masturbation in boys.


Was Dr John Harvey Kellogg one sick fuck, or what?  Is the word 'zealous' code for 'sick fuck'?  It needs to be. Somebody tell the guys writing the DSM-V to slip that one in...


Sunday, July 8, 2012

El Volador


Beautiful photograph of Dianella amoena captured by Boobook who is an amateur Aussie naturalist living in Geelong, Victoria.


Gresswell Hill is about 9 hectares in size (Muyt, 2004) and was once a part of the Mont Park Psychiatric hospital grounds. It formed a Nature Conservation reserve in 1978. La Trobe University took over management of the reserve in the mid 1990’s, as the land around it was developed for housing. Gresswell Hill contained a former army signal tower and still contains a decommissioned water tower.


Gresswell Hill is home to at least 30 significant species of indigenous plants, including one species of National Significance, Matted Flax Lily (Dianella amoena), four species of Regional Significance within Greater Melbourne, and 25 species of High Regional Significance in North-east Melbourne.


Gresswell Hill forms an important part of the regional habitat corridor linking Diamond Creek valley with the Plenty and Yarra River Valleys.[1]









Notilia

[1]  The La Trobe Wildlife Sanctuary was set up in 1967 as a project in the restoration and management of indigenous flora and fauna. The Wildlife Sanctuary's primary aim is to provide opportunities for learning about indigenous flora and fauna through engaging with the community.

When Opportunity Knocks.....you off-balance.





Aedes aegypti mosquito, vector for dengue fever



During 1941-1943 a little known epidemic of Dengue Fever swept Queensland down to Brisbane with up to 85% infection rates in some towns. In Townsville alone, 5000 cases were reported with 25,000 probable infections. Judging from past performance and taking other areas into account, it is guesstimated that this figure could at least be doubled.[1]


In 1943, a young woman of 19 would take a twilight river cruise on a Brisbane river and be bitten by a mosquito.  Born and bred in the southern state of Victoria, the young woman was in Queensland, having been offered an opportunity to work as a clerk with the Australian Tax Office. In war-time Australia such positions were hard to come by and highly desirable with good prospects for the future.  It was a contract position for six months and when expired, the young woman returned to Melbourne.

Succinct entries in her diary of 1943, 1944 and 1945 leave a trail of frequent visits to general practitioners, first in Brisbane, and then in Melbourne.  With an economy of words, the young woman tells her story:


Fever. Terrible headache. Very listless.  HaemorrhageAching all over.


Those are the clues the daimon of that young woman left me ~ a shaman with forensic skills ~ trusting that I would, with an integrated knowledge of Western health sciences, skills in energy medicine, become an Adept at tracking the path of seemingly unconnected crumbs of evidence, and to arrive at a destination in order to close a door.


Thirteen years later in 1957 this woman, now 33, would experience a psychosis so severe as to warrant hospitalization within the Experimental Ward of a renowned Melbourne psychiatric hospital. Eventually a diagnosis of Manic Depression would be affixed to her symptomology.  That initial diagnosis would not really be reviewed or questioned, and the drugs prescribed did little to resolve the underlying disturbance which truly was organic in its nature.


Extract Mendhekar DN, Aggarwal P, Aggarwal A. Classical mania associated with dengue infection

Dengue fever is considered to be one of the major health problems in South East Asia. [Australia is just down the globe, Australasia]  Initially, neurological manifestations associated with dengue received little attention but now there have been several reports of encephalitis and encephalopathy. However nowhere in literature has dengue fever been mentioned as a cause of or associated with acute psychosis or mania.


Here we report a 21-year-old male, a resident of Delhi who after an acute dengue infection, developed an episode of classical mania.  He was admitted to psychiatry department with history of overactivity, excessive talking, argumentativeness, extreme irritability, grandiosity, abusiveness and decreased need for sleep of 4 days duration. Six days prior to onset of psychiatric illness he developed fever (40.3oC) associated with severe headache, confused behavior, generalized body ache, anorexia and occasional vomiting.


Patient was diagnosed as a case of mood disorder, with manic feature according to DSM-IV-TR (293.83). Emergence of manic symptoms in the absence of risk factors such as personal and family history of bipolar illness, cyclothymia suggests organic condition responsible for the mania. A systematic study is needed to find out the prevalence of associated psychiatry disorders.[2]

Aggarwal's article was cited by researchers Blum Pfeifer & Hartz in their 2010 correspondence, Psychiatric manifestations as the leading symptom in an expatriate with Dengue Fever, in which a 52-year old Swiss female patient in Haiti presented with physical symptoms of a blood-borne disorder, and following her admission to hospital developed a psychiatric syndrome characterized by the following symptoms: ideas of reference and delusions with vivid acoustic and visual hallucination, accompanied by agitation and psychotic fears. She heard voices denouncing her from people close to a (non-existent) swimming pool. [3]


It is a well-known fact that the vector for Dengue Fever, the mosquito Ae. aegypti is clearly well able to utilize any available breeding site: large water holding sites are their preferred nurseries.

The number of positive large water holding sites like drums and water storage jars averaged 39%, mid-sized containers like rock holes, buckets and tires averaged 44%, and all other small containers averaged 48%. A reduction in large water storage containers due to the introduction of piped water could be expected to reduce the overall mosquito population and increase the number of positive mid to small sized containers. Seasonality is unlikely to influence breeding sites that are maintained by human activities, however, small rain-filled breeding sites could be severely affected since they require frequent refilling to maintain larvae. [4]



The ability to interpret images contained within hallucinatory states is not the forte of practitioners of Western medicine whose vision has been narrowed and impaired by too many hours spent peering through a microscope, and inhaling the fumes of formalin.  Western health sciences do not teach their students the language of the soul, does not teach their acolytes the subtle nuances of the visual language the intelligence of the body employs in order guide the shamanic practitioner into making a more focused assessment of the bug-a-boo which has breached the immune-defences of the patient.


Unfortunately, in 1957 Melbourne, this thirtysomething female patient's physical symptoms and psychotic presentation was not identified as being manifestations of an acute recurrence of dengue. They would have assumed dengue to have been a factor and perhaps were not aware of her previous medical history, and most likely they did not even think to contact this woman's general practitioner to discuss her history. 


Such failure to pay attention to details is the thin wedge of medical malpractice...and much more to boot.


The physicians and psychiatrists would not have expected to see this female patient's psychiatriac manifestations as the leading symptoms in a recurring cycle of Dengue Fever: and so they did not see
beyond their bubble.


Four years later, in 1961, this woman would give birth to a female child unaware that dengue had predisposed her to certain pregnancy complications.  The child was delivered via emergency C-section after the cord prolapsed placing both mother and child at extreme risk.  It was opportune that a highly skilled and competent doctor was in attendance who acted swiftly to release the child from a hostile womb. The medical facility was not a well-equipped inner city hospital, but a small bush-nursing centre on the far outskirts of Melbourne.


It all could have gone the other way.  My life could have ended there and then. 






Today is the birth day of a remarkable woman and extraordinary healer whose life and times has been my inspiration and touchstone for the research that I do:  Elisabeth Kubler-Ross.


Watch that first step:  it's a doozy!



Notilia

[1] A Review of the Dengue Mosquito, Aedes aegypti (Diptera: Culicidae), in Australia. Dean Canyon (PhD). Tropical Infectious and Parasitic Diseases Unit, School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, James Cook University, Townsville Qld 4811, Australia

[2] Mendhekar DN, Aggarwal P, Aggarwal A. Classical mania associated with dengue infection. Indian J Med Sci [serial online] 2006 [cited 2012 Jul 7];60:115-6. Available from: http://www.indianjmedsci.org/text.asp?2006/60/3/115/22764

[3] Abstract Infection Volume 38, Number 4 (2010), 341-343, DOI: 10.1007/s15010-010-0029-9

[4] Dean Canyon, PhD.

Image of penguin found at The Peta Files