The Recycled Leopard

The Recycled Leopard

Dear Friends:
At the top of my office stairs, 20 steps up, there looking down on my arrival each day, is a recycled mass of materials sculptured in the form of a leopard hanging on the wall. Through cold blue marble eyes it watches my every move as I approach it, coming and going. It is the exquisite and fearful work of a friend, Calvin Walton, an "outside" artist from Stone Mountain, GA, who has a creative eye for making beautiful animal sculptures from the detritus and cast-offs of the world. Its tail is a piece of rope, its body a combination of cardboard and plywood, its legs bamboo stalks, its face fashioned from a molded and heated plastic milk carton and its whiskers wire strands. It is beautifully and brilliantly painted and stands on a hollowed-out branch of an oak tree, hanging silently on the wall surveying its domain of the stairwell.

Though inanimate, its presence always reminds me that when I enter the office I will be faced with challenges, fears, hidden snares, controversy and the multitude of trials and vicissitudes of life that occur to us daily. Now, I can remain downstairs in the comfort of the conference room and not have to be faced with all this, but what would life be without it all? No, I appreciate the daily warnings from my recycled leopard pal and am encouraged to enter the world again.

You know, most of the fears and worries we have in life are baseless, and much has its genesis in the recycled and cast-offs of our past. And most of the things we fear never happen, though they often appear to be fearful leopards at the top of our stairs. It occurs to me that a regular house-cleaning of this detritus would be helpful for us all.

So, I think I will take a lesson from Calvin Walton and see if I can sculpt something beautiful and useful from some of my own recycled parts, and it is my hope that you may wish to do likewise ... and I especially hope that all of your fears and worries, challenges and obstacles are nothing more today than a harmless and beautifully painted recycled leopard at the top of your stairs.



Bud

1/25/2007