Balderdash! Presents...A New Year's Nudge
After a lovely holiday break, the folks here at Balderdash! were planning to start the year off with a good, old-fashioned round of classic stupidity. New Year’s resolutions about starting a cult or learning how to launder money or setting up a raccoon fight club/brewery. We’ll probably get to all of those things in 2025. But we thought it might be nice to wish you a Happy New Year with a very sincere encouragement: DRAW and WRITE. Ideally with physical materials on a blank page.
One of the founding principles of Balderdash! is that making marks on the paper page (or the digital drawing pad, if that’s your persuasion) is a good, healing, thought-provoking, inherently reflective, grounding, magical, fog-lifting, cosmos-exploring, malaise-intervening, radical, pain-relieving, temporality-dancing, necessary, human thing to do. It’s special.
If you’re the kind of person who pays attention, you know this year is going to be a rough one. And there will be a constant temptation to disconnect and escape. And sure, we should give into that temptation a bit to maintain some sanity. But drawing/scribbling/scrawling, we find, is an immensely useful way of balancing the desire to “be somewhere else” while also grappling with where and when you are.
Nature journal advocate and educator John Muir Laws likes to use the phrase “your brain on paper” when talking about sketching and note-taking about your experiences of nature. Draw what you’re seeing, acknowledge what you’re reminded of, and ask questions. It’s a beautiful, generative way of engaging with the observable natural world. But the same idea applies to artfully journaling about anything--the news, your kids, work, your town, the tangled mess of your own anxieties and imagination.
When you're in a sketchbook or notepad, the sensory and intellectual experience can feel very much like entering a pocket dimension within our own reality. You're still here and affected by everything our "real" world is, but you're also occupying a place that is uniquely yours. As your hand is drawing lines and letters or applying paint and feeling, you inflate a bubble around you (however translucent and porous that bubble might be). As vulnerable and connected as you are to your experience of living, a pen-to-page tactile effort to make something out of it is a defiant act of protection, preservation, and expanding possibility.
Prompted and/or of their own calling, my kids scribble and doodle every day. And peering through and across the film of their own creative bubbles, I can see how their own projects process pain, love, human connection, science, language, current events, good, evil, danger, and hope. When they draw and write, they're learning. And they're also experimenting with and establishing WHO they are. Watching them and then myself and then others who share their own sketchbook work, I feel very confident that doodling and scribbling are ways of being ourselves and of saving ourselves.
In 2025, Balderdash! hopes that you'll find (or continue) the kinds of activities that allow you to keep living and to protect yourself and to encourage other people to do the same. If you don't have that kind of thing in your world right, please consider grabbing some pens and a sheet of paper. This is the year to get scrawling.