Look at the birds....

^{Yesterday, while in the workshop, I began to talk about why I've been stressed of late. Besides an imminent house move to where I still didn't know -- which will come as little surprise to those who know me -- I've also had the usual dilemmas of whether my editorial clients will or will not pay and a sense of time slipping through my fingers. So, I was moaning about how working for entire days in the internet imparted a sense of irreality to how I spend much of my time and what I do, and the frustration I often feel about doing so many things just to be able to get round to what I really want to do, only to find that I never get there, namely, writing. So I've spent years trying to work myself into a niche -- enough income, time, space, etc. -- from which to write, but without being able to do any writing at all and, worse still, without seeming any closer to my goal. "And at my back I always hear/Time's winged chariot hurrying near...." aaaaaaargh! And it occurred to me that perhaps the birds were right. I've been doing this for nearly 10 years now, getting nowhere. Perhaps it's time to change direction.
The birds? Yes, birds, Bible, Matthew 6:}

Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?

Just perhaps I would be better off and have more time for what I should be doing, if I just got on and did it and simply had the confidence that somehow, somehow, the bills would get paid, and there would be rent money and I would find a really nice place to live and, and, and.... "I lack faith," I admitted, "I do lack the faith that that would work out." At that very moment, someone who I had met some months back in my initial house hunt came up the workshop stairs. "I wonder if you would be interested in doing me a favour," she asked, "do you think you might be interested in a house sit during April?"

Some house sit! Valle Grande, or "Big Valley" (I like that!). "It's got a shopfront area, so maybe you might like to sell your things over the Easter holiday, and you'd be doing me a great favor if you watered the yards. The view is jaw-dropping, and other than the noise of the river at the bottom of the garden, utter silence. So far from city lights that the dark is actually dark at night, the starlight real starlight not those palid pinpoints of lights. And freedom from the pressure of bills for a month? Would I?! You betcha!

"We'll talk about May when we get close to May," she said. Was I going to start worrying about May in the middle of March? (Think birds, look at the birds....)

P. S. I'll post pictures soon! Meanwhile, the image above is from Ernst Haeckel's Kunstformen der Natur (Artforms of nature) (1904) which are amazing and visible at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Kunstformen_der_Natur and http://caliban.mpiz-koeln.mpg.de/~stueber/haeckel/kunstformen/natur.html