Happy hands

Look at these hand mudras. Aren't they pretty? This one is the Bhûtadâmara Mudrâ, or Gesture of Warding Off Evil.

Right now I'm drawing a lot of these – the Abhaya Mudrâ, or Gesture of Fearlessness, is another one I really love – and finding the practice strangely soothing. I like to draw them without looking at my pen, so that the finished drawings are loose and organic looking, slightly distorted. I like coloring them, too.

Coming from a religious tradition that lacked any kind of visual language – no collars, cassocks or crosses, no stained glass, no statues, icons, pictures or paintings except for photo portraits of the First Presidency and those little cardboard Bible posters you could check out of the church library to use in your Sunday school presentation – I'm fascinated with religious art that tells stories without using words. Like those pictures of Shiva where he's dancing on a prostrate dwarf, and he has all those arms and hands, each one holding some symbolic object, and he's kicking up his leg, and there's the moon, and that snake around his neck, and then there's all that stuff in the background – I love the way those images invite my mind to relax and engage in a totally new way. It's like the difference between reading a paragraph describing a certain kind of flower, and seeing a full color photograph of it. The paragraph might awaken my imagination with intriguing history and details, but I'm not going to sit there reading it over and over again. In fact, the main benefit of the paragraph is that it helps me create a picture in my mind, and it's the picture that I relate to and want to spend time with. And, falling in love with the picture, I'm much more inclined to get out there and seek out the real thing.

So yeah, I'm enjoying me some pictures of hands making symbolic gestures, these days.

In other news, a couple of people at my office have been bringing their dogs to work lately. One of them is the Big Boss, who has a new five-month-old yellow lab puppy and who obviously can do whatever he wants – but today someone brought in a sweet liver-and-white Springer spaniel (I'm all about the spaniels), and the other day someone else was here with her furry black shepherdy-type dog. Could it be – that I might someday be able to bring the Taterman to work again? Even just occasionally? That would be so great!

Then again, what would happen to the Jeeps? Every time we take Tater anywhere, Jeepers stands outside in the back barking continuously the entire time we're gone. For this reason, we almost never leave him alone – which means that Tater, who used to go almost everywhere with me, including to work at a dog-friendly office every day for two and a half years, almost never gets to go anywhere anymore. It's not fair that his world should shrink to the size of our back yard just because the Jeeps is too irascible to go out in public (he's bitten two people before, that we know of) and too barky and insecure to be left alone. But I don't want the Jeeps to suffer, either, and it's clear that a dog who stands out in the cold and the rain barking his head off for hours on end is not doing it because he's enjoying himself. A dog who does that is not a happy dog.

Anyway. It would still be fun to bring my dog to work again sometimes. Maybe we could get some doggie tranquilizers to help the Jeeps get through the day.