Swallowtail

I'm settled into 2014 now, evidentially!

One: I've spent more days of the week in my studio than on holiday or recuperating from winter bugs. 

Two: I've left a healthy domestic muddle indoors, avoiding the compulsion to fuss. Too much pride over housework equals diminishing returns in my studio. I hereby name it and shame it as 'evasive, compulsive, displacement disorder!' I know the condition is out of control when I get around to such nonsense as polishing spoons and making them 'spoon' together like little lovers in the draw...for goodness sake Jane, they're only cutlery! - who said that? 

Three: I've listened to 'Gardeners Question Time' twice this week. Meaning that I've been in my studio; the only place I listen to the radio, for sufficient consecutive days; to shout out 'snap'...and believe me I do when it happens, with an empowered sense of victory over distraction!

Of course most evidentially of all; professionally speaking, 'settled' means art in tangible form. I'm not counting musing, doodling or 'studying in the field' as I euphemistically call chasing butterflies; fun but technically playing. I'm talking stepping into my studio space and seeing something accomplished resting on my desk. This morning that 'something' was a Swallowtail butterfly, poised beside the tweezers which, with finishing touch I had bent the crook of its legs. Yesterday, as the pips of five 'o' clock chimed on 'PM at five PM'  (I don't count that as a 'snap' victory by the way, it would be too easy), I had left him where he rested like a held breath. 

I never really know if I can breath a sigh of satisfaction over what I have achieved until I've stepped away from it for a while. Only when I catch sight of it anew, almost by surprise, do I know if it has transcended that sense of my having fashioned it and assumed its own energy. Instead becoming something born of its inspiration, nature...something with a natural energy not a crafted sense. The test is simple, a butterfly that fails to make me smile is simply not a butterfly. It made me smile. I hope it makes you smile too.