The Masterpiece by Kelly Swanson

By Kelly Swanson

My grandmother knew the true art of biscuit making. How I used to love watching her work in the early hours of winter in that tiny kitchen with the checkered curtains. I remember the way the sunlight used to stream down on the lines in her weathered face. The way her gnarled fingers would knead the dough with the tenderness and strength that had come from years of faith and hardship. The smile on her face as she took her time sifting the flour, humming about Jesus and bringing in the sheaves. The tears that fell into the flour when Grandpa Jimmy died. The fierceness with which she pounded the dough when they told her that she was too old to drive. The way her body moved with the rolling pin as if it were a long time dance partner. Each step precisely coordinated. Each ingredient measured with an exactness and precision as natural to her as breathing. A process that changed in tune with the world around her and yet stayed as familiar as the look on her face when my daddy walked into the room. Years of tweaking and fine tuning created biscuits that were as a personal to her as the scent that clung to her fingers throughout the day. I used to try to make biscuits like hers but I could never come close. I was never willing to put the sweat and the tears into them that my grandmother did. Those biscuits were her masterpiece just as your speech is your masterpiece. If you want your speech to stand out in the sea of familiarity, you have to be able to put the sweat and tears into the process. For it is only when we push ourselves that we find the buried treasure underneath.

Where the spirit does not work with the hand there is no art. Leonardo Da Vinci

I know that to paint the sea really well, you need to look at it every hour of every day in the same place so that you can understand its way in that particular spot and that is why I am working on the same motifs over and over again, four or six times even. Claude Monet

If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful at all. Michelangelo