[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

The Fish

The fish lies pinned out on my work surface, a rather battered and 
slightly scorched piece of wallboard. It (he? she?) is cobalt blue, 
with paler blue fins and tail.

The fish may become as beautiful as the glass out of which I cut his 
(her) pieces, with bands of silver solder cutting across her (his) 
body, silver wires trisecting its tail. Likely not, though. I am not 
yet at the point of glassworking where my productions equal the 
beauty of the raw materials I started with. My baby-sized glass stash 
still intimidates the hell out of me. It is so lovely, and my work is 
still so crude.

This is okay, though, Creation takes practice. Look at the pit of the 
avocado, as Peg Bracken pointed out long ago. Maybe the Creator had 
to fool around for a while, not because the Creator is in any way, 
shape, or form imperfectly competent, but just because this seems to 
be a process of co-creation. Any parent could tell you that it isn't 
parent-forming-child; it's a dance, and a subtle and sometimes 
difficult one, with child-forming-parent.

As I have written before, I do not get to dictate the behaviour of 
that frozen liquid, glass; it has its nature, with which I have to 
work. Unlike the Creator, my creation-skills are still very much in 
the developmental stage, which is okay. I have been told that sooner 
or later, it will all come together, and my hands will know what 
skills they need.

But what I do find is that in all creation there is fascination and 
frustration and deep joy. I tumble words together, trying to make 
sense of experience. As I said to my bright younger son, experience 
is kinesis; it's how we make sense of Stuff. But operating 
kinetically is a creative business. I cannot imagine or intuit or 
reason my way from cobalt glass to finished fish; I have to get 
hands-on, which, for someone with long-standing motor issues, is not easy.

Love isn't abstract or intellectual or heard; it's hands-on, and if 
our love is not kinetic it is not love. If love isn't creative, it 
isn't of God, because God is creator. It's a delicious secret that we 
harbour: the single biggest argument for the existence of God is the 
Problem of Creation. What lies on the far side of the Big Bang? How 
can we, in a few hundreds of thousands of years -- a mere blip on the 
screen of Time -- have evolved a nervous system with hundreds of 
billions of neuroconnections, dancing and playing in nanoseconds? 
What can we make of the mysterious spirituality and lovingness of 
cats? What about Godincidences, the moments when something turns up 
that sets our feet in a new and different path?

My fish is an act of creation, a very small act (about 7 by 3-1/2 
inches, 12 pieces, very crude) but it is still an act of creation -- 
of voting to *make something* joyously and as a matter of humbly learning.

I'll copper the pieces and solder them tomorrow, and my friend Krista 
will have her fish the day after that.



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A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in 
no other way. -- Mark Twain