Does Mother Nature have a good lawyer?

Some nights it's hard to sleep, knowing the truth about my evil ways. I'm a kleptomaniac. I steal good ideas from Mother Nature all the time. Whew, that confession felt good! 

But...I have a great excuse!   I'm a Nature Artist. I use raw materials from the Great Outdoors to celebrate the beauty of nature. So if there's a stick that delicately curves off into infinity...of course I'll appreciate it and maybe even bring it home to use in a sculpture that celebrates branches that curve into infinity.

This dancing stick framed by an arch...how dramatic!

What about something that's almost a completed spirit house, like, oh lets say, a cherry tree burl? All it really needs is a door and it's done. Is that too much of a rip off?

OK, does this look like a heart to anyone else?

This burl was in my shop for two years before I heard it calling from under the work bench. I moved it onto the workbench for awhile. Too bulky to keep there,  threw it into the discard pile, then pulled it back out, put it on the bench again and let it sit there a couple of weeks.

It is after all a charming little burl. The moss is still green after a couple of years. Maybe it has a future. Eventually I turned it around of course and saw the house it was asking to be. On the non-mossy house it was just a slash of wood, hollowed out.

Just needed a little rehab to be to be move-in ready

All it really needed was a door, a weathered door, and maybe some windows.

Oh, and there's room for a light inside, so it'll need a chimney. One that looks like there's been many fires inside, because this isn't a new house at all. Oh look at this perfect cluster of branches poking out. Of course...I used to have more wood from this, my neighbor's prize cherry.  It only took an hour to find a branch from that particular tree - it has to match, right?

And steps, because the way to enter the secret passage is up a little high to reach.

A shingled roof is a bit too finished for this house, so I roofed it with shards of moss-hued wood. Sort of playful...and over the door needs a little coverage too, come to think of it. It rains a lot where moss like this grows. 

Yo! Nature spirits! Step into the warm.

Even if Mother Nature doesn't have any gripes with using her intricately beautiful bits of creation, I hope that my alterations aren't stealing the glory here. As an artist I want to create something fun, but also thought provoking. We share this world with so many other creatures and we live in generous biomes that we didn't create and can never replicate. 

If putting a little face and character on bits of nature makes anyone pause and think twice about how we interact with nature, then to me it's good art. But I think I'll still call my lawyer, just in case Mother Nature has a lawyer AND a temper!