Life in the Garden

Matters of Life and Death

mental health

Secrets Revealed in the Garden

Every year about this time the spiders get active in the garden. Big bulbous garden spiders with stripedy legs. They work hard and fast to spin out some striking web designs. Always on a main thouroughfare through the garden. Have you ever walked face first into a spider web?

Never mind that, after frantically making sure I didn’t have spiders in my hair, I settled in and had a breakthrough regarding a problem of my own web design that’s been plaguing me for months! Eureka!

There’s a narrow window now from 7:30-7:45 PM that is truely golden. If you get a chance to step out, DO.

And fade.

And Don’t Forget to Breathe

Jack Lalanne
Jack Lalanne

In order to offset the grim business of death and dying, I like to mix it up a couple of days with fitness in the morning, funeral in the afternoon. The fitness police job starts very early, and there’s a narrow window where there’s no trained medical personnel on staff*. Usually, on those days I’m operating on 3-4 hours of sleep, and I’ve had a premonition that with this early bird crowd, the “Door Rattlers”, that one of my silver foxes would over exert themselves.

Today it happened a little after 6 AM. One of the regulars strolled in half asleep and starting gettin’ sweaty on the stepmill. I saw him fall backward and heard his head thud. Luckily, we had a doctor in the house who also happened to be working out and took control.

The doctor revived him, our patient walked out on his own two feets and admitted he was straight out of bed, no food, no liquids. No good.

Today’s Fitness Tip: Avoid consuming cabbage and fried food before strenuous exercise.

*I am CPR certified and can shock your heart as well as fire a taser.

Don’t Make Me Do This

Last week I had a client who had been corresponding with me using two different email addresses. When client requested an invoice to be emailed, I had to ask, “Should I use the xxx@ address or donkeydik@xxxx?”

No Lie.

Canned Soul

Politicians had been talking for years about the need to replace the Oregon State Hospital, but didn’t get serious about it until a group of legislators made a grim discovery during a 2004 tour: the cremated remains of 3,600 mental patients in corroding copper canisters in a storage room. The lawmakers were stunned.

“Nobody said anything to anybody,” said Oregon Senate President Peter Courtney, who dubbed the chamber “the room of lost souls.”

The remains belonged to patients who died at the hospital from the late 1880s to the mid-1970s, when mental illness was considered so shameful that many patients were all but abandoned by their families in institutions.

After doing some research into the story, Photographer David Maisel got in touch with the hospital administrators – the same hospital, it turns out, where they once filmed One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – and he was granted access to the room in which the canisters were stored.

Maisel set up a temporary photography studio inside the hospital itself. There, he began photographing the canisters one by one.

His book, Library of Dust, will be released later this summer.

Tip of the Hat to: Cleanser