Have you ever noticed how accidents seem to happen in slow motion? Once I lost control of my car and it spun around and slammed into a muddy hillside – no one hurt, not even the car – and even though it all happened in a split second I remember spinning slowly for a long time before the crash.
The other day I was putting the finishing glaze touches on a rabbit for a totem pole I’m building. I laid the rabbit on its’ side, stepped around the table to get something, looked back and the rabbit was slowly rolling off of the table. Nooooo!! Even though I leaped into action to grab it, I was too late. SPLAT! onto the floor.
After the horror of the moment passed, “On Top of Spaghetti”, that old childhood song about the meatball popped, into my head. ‘It rolled off the table and onto the floor and then my poor meatball rolled out of the door’. Some type of coping mechanism I guess so I could laugh for a minute, shake it off and get myself started on making the piece over. I decided to look at it as an opportunity to make an even better rabbit than I had made the first time around.
It’s nice when we get a ‘do over’ opportunity. So many things happen and there is no undoing them. As much as we have that instinct to fix everything and make it better again sometimes we just can’t. I am grateful that in the studio doing it again is just part of the game.
When I first started making totem poles part of the appeal was that each piece of the totem was separate so I could rearrange or remake any piece that didn’t suit me. Over the years I’ve swapped out many pieces during the construction process to make each of my totem poles my very best work. This time around it was just not a swap I had in mind.
I do like the new bunny though!
Alexis Moyer