A Rule, known to all serious artists promises Life will get in the way anytime you're facing a deadline or especially inspired to create.  I've been working on a collection for Kiowa Gallery for Alpine's Gallery Night 2007. (November 16-17) A big deal. Food. Wine. Music. Art. Ten thousand people came last year. Kiowa expects me to fill a wall with new paintings. And gallery owner Keri Artzt, who frames all my work, expects an early October delivery of my last painting for the event. No pressure there. I work well under deadlines. Don't we all.
Enter the Rule.
Mom broke her foot. Pulling into Lubbock to check on her, we slashed an RV tire. While in the city getting a new tire, my man Jim scheduled two hip replacements. (He set up his surgeries so as to be mobile for Gallery Night. Men like that don't grow on mesquite bushes.) Enroute home to Fort Davis, with the climb up Wild Rose Pass still ahead, the truck commenced screeching. We limped over the Pass and into A.M.P., where super-mechanic Blake admitted our Ford 250 diesel for a transmission replacement.
Blake is our mechanic of choice, wherever we are. But living in the Davis Mountains teaches one patience. Just because we needed a new transmission didn't mean one would arrive way out here in a timely manner. So we spent 10 days anchored at MacMillen's RV Resort in town while the transmission navigated closer via slow boat through the mountains. It was a quiet 10 days. By necessity, we stayed close to the RV. Town is tiny, but if Jim could walk the streets of Fort Davis, he wouldn't be getting two new hips next month.
Sour-faced and thinking about all the paintings I hadn't gotten done back in the studio, I lugged two weeks worth of dirty clothes to the small laundry building at the RV park. And there, behind the laundry, was a shaded view of Sleeping Lion Mountain splashed in afternoon light and shadow.

"Sleeping Lion"  4" x 6" pastel by Lindy Severns
   I dashed back to the RV for my plein air easel and pastels. They stay packed. Five minutes and a thorough snake-check later, and I was all set up and painting the landmark mountain, which from some angles really does look like a reclined lion. Absorbed in capturing the fleeting and elusive clouds, I didn't notice I wasn't alone. Until a scrawny cat rubbed against me. He gnawed my ankle petulantly, then leapt onto my easel's outspread shelf, scattering pastels. Purring. Insistently.
My pastels being a mess now, I stopped and played with the cat awhile. When I finally resumed painting, one load of laundry was done and the light on the mountain was different. Perfect-different. A small splash of light across a darkly shadowed mountain. It was as if Sleeping Lion was waking from its siesta while I watched.
I don't know what I might have produced in the studio during those two long weeks. But I like what I did that day.  And I made a cat happy for awhile.
Life—like a cat or a lion-shaped mountain— sometimes gets in the way. And that's as it should be.