O is for Ouroboros

        My theme for this year’s April A-Z Blog Challenge is fantastical creatures, celebrating my upcoming book, On the Virtues of Beasts of the Realms of Imagination.  Please check out my Kickstarter Campaign for all sorts of additional information, pictures, and even a video.  Huge thanks to all the backers who have already successfully brought this campaign to its goal, much to my astonishment and delight!

        And now for our featured creature:

        “The ancient artists of Egypt and Greece depicted this serpent as a simple circle, tail in mouth, but not all ouroboroses find satisfaction in the perfect circles common among their kind.  Though some find the simplicity of the circle pleasing and satisfying, others prefer to form themselves into other shapes, just as dancers long to sing with their bodies and poets long to paint with words.  Yet no matter the strange and sinuous variety of patterns enacted by the more poetical ouroboroses, every one holds its tail in its mouth, without which closure it would no longer be eternal.

        By the ouroboros we are reminded that everyone has a unique voice and vision, and it would be a terrible loss to force every person to conform themselves to the same regular shape instead of the endlessly creative variants with which our souls are naturally teeming.  But just as the ouroboros must always keep tail in mouth, so must we remember that true creativity consists not in mindlessly altering things merely for the sake of novelty, but rather in balancing the fundamentals which are truly important, with the variations that allow us to celebrate our myriad unique visions.”

        For a post about my process in imagining and creating this piece, see here.

        Are there any things that you have your own unique way of doing?  What quirky personal variations do you have for ordinary activities?  (Or maybe not so ordinary?)

The alphabet of anything-but-ordinary creatures doesn’t stop there.  Click the link to read

the entire post about Mythical Creatures of the Letter O.

[Picture: Ouroboros Makes a Poem, rubber block print by AEGN, 2014 (sold out).]