InMotion

In the West End neighborhood of New Orleans, Tacoma is shaded by live oaks, between Seattle and Portland After reading this piece by Gwen Thompkins about Quint Davis and this one  by Robert Gottlieb, a review of Emmanuel Carrere's collection of essays  97,196 Words  I felt a rush of hope.  Lately in my meditation, I have been including the practice of Lovingkindness  where you repeat mantra-like phrases that capture what one hopes for as we seek to end suffering for ourselves and others.  I learned mine from Jude Rhozen , which goes like this: May I (or you or Pete or Sally) be happy and peaceful May I be healthy and strong May I be safe and free And may I be able to care for myself with ease and joy. To these lines I often add: May I be curious and confident .  The essay and the book review above were wonderful, clearly produced by skilled writers and observers, both of whom I suspect would agree with the Noel Coward observation that "work is more fun than fun&q

Thanks for taking a look at my blog.  We sent out an end of year letter this year to 50 folks which included this blog address, and I worried about the first post being the one about my acid trip 50 years ago! So here are some pictures from more recent times (the last year or so).  I also included one with some of my colleagues from our last Group Health Cooperative annual party before becoming Kaiser Permanente Washington, do I look pleased about my upcoming retirement? If you haven't seen this already, it's pretty cool.  POP MUSIC!   I love it. HAPPY HOLIDAYS        HAPPY CHRISTMAS         HAPPY NEW YEAR -Rob New bridge over the bayou, NOLA We got married here 35 years ago.The chapel in East Sangerville, Maine Home (weather permitting) This is us At Work Status update Dad kept on rolling, with a little help Samantha and Jon, definitely ready to go 1 2 3 A Samantha Mullen vision, marvelous. Can do pretty muc

Several weeks ago I was relaxing, talking with two younger friends both between the ages of 25 and 35.  They told me about their camping trip the previous weekend, when they took magic mushrooms.  Their experiences were quite different. One had a very pleasant, joyful good time while the other had a pretty intense trip that was both pleasant and unpleasant.  They appeared to be struggling to make sense of it. I wanted to share with them what happened to me while tripping as a very young man. But instead of the story I write about here, I just said something about a “bad trip” and didn’t share the way I was hoping to at the time. Since then, I have reflected on my experience and write about it here. Hopefully my story can be useful to others even as the process of recalling it is useful to me.   When I was a teenager, I dropped acid, took mescaline, and used psilocybin.  We all have memory nodes that are central to our early experience; events that feel like milestones and that