Scottish Swans

Our teacher Derek Walls, from Edinburgh College of Art, taught us a spectacular technique to make swans, as a warm up to get the working rhythm. It's all about timing. Fata Trapuntina couldn't resist making it an habit, in the pictures above you can se the transformation from hen to swan.

And at this point I must introduce the link between this creation and the story of the 'Ugly Duckling', where the swan, not knowing itself, felt ugly and lonely, until it understands through suffering, its real Inner Nature and recognises its family.  Like all fairy tales it teaches us something.

The concepts of ugly or wrong are mental creations.

Everything is.

In understanding this, through terrible suffering, the single/ugly duckling has to learn to know and accept itself therefore to know and accept the other.

Buddhists put all this in a word : compassion = with passion = to put passion towards the other = to put oneself in the other's shoes.

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