Man, if this isn't a metaphor...

Above you see the shards of a piece of pottery we bought decades ago. It was a lovely, elegant vessel that sat on our mantelpiece in the living room until a few years later when Miranda, one of our favorite kitties, decided for reasons known only to her that she needed to leap up to the mantel and take a stroll, carefully knocking off this piece to shatter on the hearth below.

I swept up all the pieces and made some half-hearted attempts to reassemble it. Lichtenbergian life being what it is, other projects soon claimed my attention and this one went into a paper bag — Cras melior est — where it stayed on the floor of my study until this week when I had to move everything away from the wall for our HVAC guys to install a new (and non-leaky) air-conditioning unit.

I decided to tackle the project again, and this time, I’m going to add one piece per day to it until it’s at least one thing again.

If that isn’t a metaphor for the creative process, I don’t know what is.