(here’s the FaceBook link to the coloring book page in case you can’t get it to download from here.  You may have to friend me to get to it, but I think the pictures are open to everyone, not just friends.  altho I would love to be you FB friend too!)

When I was doing my graduate work, I did research on masks, what constitutes a mask, how we wear them and what we use them for, and then made a book using pictures and quotes (my love of gathering quotes goes waaaay back!).

My favorite uses of masks included the Northwest Native American tradition of using masks to protect viewers from the innate power of the god depicted, and the Jungian practice of making a dream mask, donning it, telling the dream and then letting the viewers interact with the energy of the mask.

It definitely broadened my understanding of mask to include makeup or no makeup, clothes, hair….just about anything that makes a non-verbal statement.

I still have the book.  Here are some of the quotes from it.

The world is full of masks.  We have learned to live with them on our own faces and on those of our fellow men [sic] without being aware of it.  What is more surprising is that we are inclined to take them for real faces.  We are all mask-makers, who partly prefer and partly enjoy and mainly cannot help living with a masklike make-believe of reality, a reality we assure ourselves daily that we must learn to face while, fortunately for us, we can keep it masked. Walter Sorell  (seems appropriate this day after elections).

Everything that is profound loves the mask.  Nietzche

A person may sometimes be afraid of losing face when, in reality, s/he is trying to protect the mask s/he wants to be seen and recognized as.   Sorrell again, rephrased.

The value of the mask can be fully seen only when it is worn.  Then the mask, a face alive without living, becomes part of the being who charges it with a life force.   Carole Sivin (makes me think of all the plastic surgery and botox I see on tv and how woman now have faces that don’t move and how some consider that beautiful).

There are masked words abroad, I say, which nobody understands, but which everybody uses, and most people will also fight for, live for, even die for, fancying they meant this, or that, or the other, of things dear to them.  John Ruskin

If man [sic] is being forced by the dramatic experience to take another look, to re-evaluate himself and his action, could it be that the only way he will recognize ‘mythic’ truths is when he does not recognize himself – when a mask prevents him from identifying with the character?  Patricia J. MacKay

What masks do you wear?  Do you think you wear any at all? 

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