they say that god makes problems just to see what you can stand before you do as the devil pleases and give up the thing you love.

This book I read for my communism anthropology class, "Russia and Soul", is so good. I just read it for the second time, for this paper I'm writing. You should look at the author's website. She is an amazing painter as well as an amazing anthropologist. pesman.com. She studied Russian people's conceptions of dusha-- Russian soul. What kills it, what heals it, what it is. In one part of the book she's talking about what, according to her Russian friends, makes souls have depth.. she writes:

"We supposedly feel life force only when it is, like kinetic energy, moving. Potential life force, though unfelt, is assumed to have the same qualities, only suspended in the future. Unconscious, generative depths are absent as kinetic, but are potentially represented or imagined. Potential is experienced either as belief in domains that coexist with this one, or as incomplete, unclear representations. 'Deeper' and 'higher' imply either more potential or more tracks left by past movement... This is how any change of state may increase a sense of life, and even suffering may 'deepen' and enliven soul by how it 'damages' it."

i read that part to donna and we both liked it a lot.. so lately when we're discussing the relative merit of something that happened/ might happen/ is happening, i say "any change of state increases the life force!!" any movement or change of state, bad or good, increases depth. motion causes a sense of life. a new way of thinking about things.

here are some pictures. the first one is my bathroom in portland, which is the art gallery for my paintings. those are two self portraits i did. the big one was supposed to be in the style of gauguin, because i was obsessed with him at the time. still am. do you like how when i drew myself in the mirror i arranged my position so that nothing too risky was showing? that was difficult. i didn't want my whole painting class to see my "personal area" as donna says.

this is me by the clackamas river in june

and here is a lovely pictures of donna.