Virgin Mary with Child Icon in Gingerbread

I tend to think of these days, this year, perhaps even the whole past decade, as less productive.  I'm thinking about all sorts of productivity, in all sorts of ways, but for this post, I'm mainly pondering my creative output.  I spend a lot of time thinking about all the time wasted, but I rarely think about what I actually do.  Let me use yesterday as an example.

I planned to spend last week-end baking gingerbread people so that I had some rough drafts to practice my ambitious idea for my church's virtual contest.  Those gingerbread people turned into gingerbread blobs, and I didn't practice.  Then I ate the gingerbread people, and felt shame in all sorts of ways.

Yesterday after our socially distanced, outdoor church worship, I took 3 more gingerbread people once I was sure there were plenty for people who hadn't gotten theirs yet.  When I got home, I decided to plunge right in and do the decorating before I lost momentum.  I mixed up a simple icing out of powdered sugar, milk, and food coloring.  And then I created my masterpiece, which I'm calling Virgin Mary with Child Icon in Gingerbread:

I had no pastry bag or anything fancy--it's the Jackson Pollack drip method of decorating a cookie!  And look at that pink letter G in the middle--that was completely unintended--it just emerged from the drips.

I had a vision of creating a version of what I have been sketching for the last several weeks.  Here's one of my favorites of that series:

Yesterday I also finished a sketch that I've worked on for 5-7 minutes each day.  

I started it on the feast day of Santa Lucia, so I started with the bread braids.  I also had some bleed through from the previous sketch:

I had been thinking about a way of thinking about galaxies, universes and multiverses, while also having the story of the Visitation in my brain.  The Visitation commemorates the Virgin Mary's visit to her kinswoman Elizabeth.  Both women are pregnant, improbably pregnant.

As I think about my writing, I realize that it hasn't been a week devoid of poems--the poems that I've written seem shorter and less important.  But I have been writing.  

As I think about my creative processes, I realize that the pregnant Virgin Mary is relevant to me in multiple ways.  I tend to forget that creative projects, indeed many projects, need some time to gestate and germinate.  I need to remember that I'm fertile, even when I'm not producing mounds of work.