A moment of conception marked in time.

On Wednesday 13 May at 12.40pm another of my Strange Little Attractors emerged in what I've been calling a recognisable 'moment of conception'. It happens in a split second, in which a cold lump of clay is imbued with 'soul' and transformed into a 'thing' that I enter a relationship with, something I care for. In this case it was a new born calf. 

Witnessing a calf being born under my tree-house as a child growing up at Macedon in Victoria was another moment that was marked by an etching into memory. I recall being astonished ... lifted elsewhere by the event. It was as if time had been paused, the weather's breath withheld, and all tensions merged into one harmonious anticipation of the birth. And I liked to think that she came to my 'house' for a safe place to have her baby.

As always, I take note of synchronicity as a barometer of insight. The day after this 'birthing' of another sculpture, the moment I recognised it as a being that I could empathise with, my friend Heather visited sharing a similar 'marking of time' she'd read in Helen Garner's book 'This House of Grief', in which a journalist marks her knitting place with a red thread after realising it was where she had left off after being interrupted by a 'guilty' verdict in a murder case she had been following in court. "That night, at bedtime, I found the unfinished green wool scarf on the floor where I had dropped my bag. I picked it up and saw that, when the call for the verdict had come, I had stopped halfway along a row. I marked it with one red stitch. Then I knitted to the end of the row, and cast off".

Some moments just need anchoring in time and space.