Who: The Un-dr. Has been working in the mental health field since 1984. Has looked for truths, guidance, and inspiration outside the mental health field for almost as long...

What: Husband, Father, Grandfather. Psychologist who made house calls until the pandemic hit. Low-life basement musician & songwriter.

When: After many years of stops and starts: now.

Where: The World Wide Web from Minnesota in the USA.

Why: Bringing Medicine Back to the Tribe. Serving up signals in all the noise.

“The purpose of thinking is to let the ideas die instead of us dying.”—Alfred North Whitehead (or, as someone once paraphrased: "The purpose of freedom of speech is so that our ideas can go to battle and die so that our bodies don’t have to.”)

Do you think we live in crazy world? There's no shortage of analysis about the problems we face and who's to blame. What there is a shortage of is...well, in my opinion, what there is a shortage of are places to consider a wide range of alternative perspectives to what is considered acceptable. (This can result in a "consensus trance" or, in politics, "The Overton Window".) A shortage of places where you feel as though almost anything will be given a fair hearing. So, let's get started on correcting that.

Where does “Formal Rhubarb” come from?!

When I was about 22 or so, I was living on and off with my parents in the St. Paul, Minnesota house they built while I was still in the womb. One bright, sweltering summer day, I was mowing the lawn and fantasizing about being in a band someday. I kept passing near a spot where my mother used to have a garden, and I could see about 4 backyards belonging to our neighbors behind our house (we had no alley and all the backyards were connected). Two of them had much larger gardens tended by older men. They had a friendly gardening competition going and, lucky for us, they would usually have lots of extra vegetables. It was common to wake up to fresh carrots, lettuce, onions, radishes, and, yes, rhubarb on our doorstep during the summer. (It’s hard to find vegetables that taste that good these days...and I sure do miss my mother's rhubarb jam!)

Back before iPods and smartphones, the monotony of cutting relentlessly growing grass appeared to be good for growing ideas and, soon, "Formal Rhubarb" just popped into my head as a name for a band. It stuck and, although I later was in a few R&B cover bands, I never got a chance to use it. (Over the years, the handful of people who heard me mention the name usually were puzzled but polite, in that "Minnesota Nice” sort of way: "Well, that's different...”)

So what does “Formal Rhubarb” mean, anyway, and what’s in it for me?

1. Rhubarb is a plant that will act with stealth to completely take over your garden. Here I'm using it to mean the stirrings of conversation planted in the background that can take over: conversation that is unregulated and first overheard at a distance but not understood. Like a busy coffee shop humming and buzzing with chatter, noticeable but unintelligible conversation at first...until you focus and pay attention—when you do, you begin to notice certain voices, certain trends, and you can then pick one out of the many.

Or like thunder first heard from a distance before the storm is eventually on top of you. Will the storm inundate and destroy you or nourish, inspire, and foster positive growth and change? Let me invite you to help make it the stirrings of an emerging conversation that pushes things forward.

2. So what about the word “Formal”?

“Formal” as in directed attention or guidance on the part of the person who convenes the conversation. For now, that’s just me…but everyone’s invited to participate! We'll make it up as we go along...you know, improvise.

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