Microcosm, again

Working on my icon today the work is going at an extremely slow pace. After several hours, someone looking at my icon would be challenged to tell I had done any work on it at all. At other times, usually towards the beginning, it may appear to me as though I have made tremendous progress within a short period of time. And it dawned on me that this pattern is one seen in living things. Anyone who's watched a child or a plant grow knows about such things as growth spurts. And then there are other times, the teen years for example, where nothing appears to be happening for long periods of time. But all the while, the process of growth and maturation is occurring -- sometimes on a microscopic level, and sometimes that is where the most important changes take place.
When we work on and icon, both we and the icon echo this biological process of growth toward maturity. We fix the icon, the icon fixes us. Long ago when I discovered the Fibonacci number that predicts the spiral mathematically in a sunflower, a pineapple, or a whorl of human hair, I thought I had discovered one of God's, His use of order and patterns that are mimicked throughout the universe. As I learned more about the world, I found I was not the first "genius" to think so. Einstein believed "God is in the details." So the tiniest of details can be most important, and it is true in the practice of iconography. I can work on an eye 20 times before it becomes correct. Even though I and my icon do not look like we are making progress, we are changing on a microscopic level, moving away from chaos toward order and God's design for us.