Friday, August 31, 2007

The Bible is ambiguous.

Wednesday, August 29, 2007

When you hurry, hurry gently.

Saturday, August 25, 2007

When the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire killed hundreds of poor women workers in a building where the fire escape doors were chained shut, Franklin Roosevelt was in Washington, D.C. working as Assistant Secretary of the Navy.

Francis Perkins regretted that for the rest of her life.

She had worked for labor issues, in and out of government, for years when the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire happened, and she knew that she had a teachable moment.

She took New York State politicians with powerful government jobs on detailed, in person tours of conditions of people who had jobs but no power.

FDR wasn't on the tours because he was in Washington.
Hearty because she's gone. After Elizabeth Barrent Browning died, Robert Browning became a whole other guy, publicly. After mourning, he became aggressively social, kind of hard to take if you didn't like him, and even if you did. Dominating the room, shutting up the other people in it by psychic and actual loudness.

Thursday, August 16, 2007

Frieda Fromm-Reichmann worked as a psychiatrist with the schizophrenic Joanne Greenberg. Greenberg got totally better and wrote a book, later, about the healing called "I Never Promised You a Rose Garden," first published under a pen name, Hannah Green because mental health professionals, most of them, knew with religious faith that schizophrenics didn't get better. Especially they didn't get better through talk therapy.

When the book, fiction, came out, many mental health professionals said it couldn't be based on something true.

Many regular human beings and people who were or had been mental health patients really wanted it to be true, and basically it was. The general thrust--healing--and many of the details.

Frieda Fromm-Reichmann's first job was dealing with men in a Prussian military hospital who had been damaged in the brains by guns and artillery in World War I.

A lot of shrinks came to treating schizophrenics from treating "the worried well." Fromm-Reichmann had treated such folks at a fancy spa, but coming to schizophrenics from dealing with the brain-damaged she was quite hopeful because all the brain cells were there.

She had dealt with folks who had intense symptoms and limits because big bits of there brains were gone. She looked at a schizophrenic and saw wholeness that needed to be released.

--information from the biography of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann "To Redeem One Person Is to Redeem the World."
I am arriving at where I've been for years. I found an excellent wool sweater in May and said to myself, "Excellent. Just in time for summer." It's been good through brisk and brusk July.
The stars shine down on the flowers. The flowers notice every star. Some stars notice every distant flower and rock; others done. Stars very in sensitivity, like other living things
Go little.