Seriously considering the art therapy idea. I was in Moscow over the weekend, visting my sister for my birthday (kind of takes some of the sting out of being another year closer to being over the hill), we went to the Moscow farmer's market and visited several of the small shops there.

Random observations:

• Their farmer's market is HUGE and so vibrant! I loved it! There was a potter who was making plates with red kokanee salmon...I wanted one so, so badly, but had no cash on hand, alas.
  
• There are SO many attractive gay women there. It isn't often that I find myself feeling too feminine for comfort.... They are beautiful.
  
• There is a LOT of organic farming going on there, including an organic goat dairy, an organic creamery (cow) and countless organic vegetable farms. Orchards appear to be fewer in number but are present.
  
• Also- there are a lot of potters, artists, and artisans, a lot of emphasis on "green" art and socially concious stuff.
  
• Folks, if I ever move, add Moscow to my list of potential relocation sites....(before it was coastal only)
  
• and, in one of the aforementioned small shops, the owner had an entire (long) wall of paintings, renditions of well known paintings. They were very good. They were done by a death row inmate. The talent going to waste....slated for the executioner's chair, saddens me...which in no way condones whatever crime the guy committed (assuming he wasn't wrongfully convicted!). The father of the shop owner brings art supplies to the inmate. Art therapy for prisoners....not a field I would necessarily be drawn to, but meaningful and noteworthy nonetheless.
  

I have this idea..that ALL art is therapeutic and cathartic. I don't think that we as a society recognize this sufficiently, and particularly when it come to children. We are inclined to view art as a disposable nicety in our schools, a craft whose value is to please the parents with pretty pictures to affix to the fridge. :-/

I don't think I would have been able to endure the late winter and spring without being able to plunge my hands into the clay and made physical embodiments of my pain, to purge it by giving it a physical presence outside of myself. Art is not only not always "nice" and "pretty", it is also essential to any civilization and to every person, whether we recognize it or not. I think that not being able to express oneself is (looking for the right word here) toxic? Nope, that isn't the right word. Oh well. Will fix later.