If

With the fearful strain that is on me night and day, if I did not laugh I should die.

-- Abraham Lincoln

Well, now time passed and now it seems
Everybody's having them dreams
Everybody sees their self walkin' around with no one else
Half the people can be part right all of the time and

Some of the people can be all right part of the time but
All the people can't be all alright all of the time
I think Abraham Lincoln said that
"I'll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours", I said that

-- Bob Dylan (lyrics from "Talking World War III Blues")





"Good luck to ya"




Update:  Blue Moon

Yikes!

This is my word for today. I especially enjoy hearing it pronounced. My sense of humor needs some exercise. My cat, Oboe, expressing, "Yikes!" I'm not sure what she was reacting to, but a few seconds later she looked at me quite peacefully. In this photo, she looks the way I have been feeling as I face some of my oldest fears. I have had the experience of being frightened and then laughing with relief when the danger is past. Laughing is somewhat like the shaking response that animals have after a traumatic event, the response that allows them begin functioning again. See Somatic Experiencing.

The Sanskrit word for laughter is "hasya." I just learned that there is something called Hasya Yoga.

Humor is a prelude to faith and Laughter is the beginning of prayer.

(Reinhold Niebuhr)

In my childhood, I had a religious assistant who always told me, 'If you can really laugh with full abandonment, it's very good for your health.

(Dalai Lama)

What soap is to the body, laughter is to the soul

(Yiddish Proverb)

Sarah Before Laughter (1984)

This drawing used to have a longer title, which I have been unable to remember and which included something about C. G. Jung and the lake beside which he lived. The drawing has always felt unfinished to me, even though I had it framed. It is one of the few drawings from this period which I still own. Something is missing. Maybe that is the point.

Life Drawing #1 (1982-1983?)

This is the first of six life drawings I will be posting. They were done in an informal life drawing group that met for two hours on Tuesday evenings at Western Washington University in the Art Department. They were drawn on a large newsprint drawing pad, using A.W. Faber Castell pencils. I am grateful to Tom Sherwood for teaching me life drawing in the context of a small community class sponsored by Bellingham Parks and Recreation. I had always been able to "draw," but in his class I learned how to really look at what I was drawing. He showed us how to hold out a pencil at arm's length and make measurements, so that a drawing had correct proportions. It was a simple tool that made all the difference in the world in my life drawings. I am also grateful to R. Allen Jensen, in whose classes I began to do life drawing using chalk pastel. R. Allen Jensen's voiced appreciation of those pastel drawings was a turning point for me in that I realized my drawings "said" something to someone else. The pastel drawings were bold and colorful, more like paintings than drawings. In a class critique, another student said, in a way that I felt was dismissive, that my drawings worked mainly because of the strong color. I took what I thought was negative criticism to heart and did a drawing with black pastel chalk in a similar style to the colorful pastel drawings and brought it in for the next critique. I still laugh when I remember R. Allen Jensen's words, "Well, obviously she has nothing to say in black and white." I'll be posting "Nothing to Say in Black and White" soon.