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How artists are like Ghost Crabs

Ghost crab seen at Koh Lak Thailand

There are these tiny crabs on the beaches of Thailand that scurry spherical parcels of sand back and forth from their burrows creating amazing sand ‘crop circles’. The crabs are tiny and so easy to miss but as I walked the sand today I caught them fleeing in the periphery of vision, speeding down the straight walkways that lead down their centre of their sandscapes. If you wait, stock still, after a while they emerge, hermit-like, from their holes and continue the task of placing their sand spheres around their homes, presumably unaware of the big picture they’re creating- how like the life of an artist, everyday peddling our wares one piece at a time, rarely seeing the view from above, concerned only with the struggle of the work in front of us, I wonder what the crab would think if I lifted him and showed him the splendour below?

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