Abstraction

It was a busy day, but a great one, spent with CB. Among the many things we discussed, abstraction was frequently brought up as a necessity in our chosen - of late -  ventures of creativity and thought. CB loves historical reenactment, metalworking, shop-working, and many sorts of historically re-creative craftsmanship of a most excellent sort. If you willingly lend a listening ear and ask the right questions, his quantity and quality of knowledge in the area is seemingly boundless.
(Thank you very much for this, and hopefully again)
CB was explaining how he loves walking into various shops like pet stores, radio-shack type businesses, and other assorted businesses and just glancing at everything, locking it away in his memory. When walking through the pet store, he noticed a peacock feather, and noted how usable that sort of thing is in costume recreation; or a dog-ramp, and abstracting that into a means of easily loading equipment into the truck (if suitably weighted - and he mentioned constructing his own, simply abstracting from the designs of the given ramps).
I commented how it is this sort of abstraction that displays his love and aptitude for these creative shop adventures. He sees a piece of metal, and checks its tensile strength (ductility) and its type, and can infer information about how he might reuse those estimates in other projects making similar or dissimilar things. Don't I do the same thing with words (though with less practice and understanding)?
Both CB and I tend towards rational minds, and abstraction was a trained learning process, not a natural step in our thought patterns. I see a tree, and I see a web, and the tree is under no circumstances a web. However, when I abstract, I can marvel at how the branches leap out into a net of limbs and leaves, woven and draping over me, cast like I am the fish beneath the draping web, frozen in time. I'm terrible at this abstraction as yet, but the study of poetry has opened my eyes, showing me how the peacock feather isn't just that, it is a fountain pen, a tuft in a fancy hat, fletching, rainbow eyelashes, and so on. The universe of abstraction isn't just a vast array of stars in a night sky, but their constellations, stories, coruscation, and the dreams and whispers they share on breezy summer nights.