pottery
I have been taking pottery class for about a month now and I love it. It has been really grounding and silences all of the noise and static in my brain. A lot of people like to throw with headphones in, but I just sit in the silence (and silent it is, because my studio isn’t a super social one). It reminds me of when I was young, like pre-teenaged, before I had an mp3 player and Green Day. And as you will know if you’ve read even a single post on this blog, I’m a whore for a metaphor. And the various stages of pottery are such incredible metaphors for lessons that apply too perfectly to life to not share, including but not limited to the below:
Finding center: The first step to any wheel-thrown piece is centering the clay, which involves anchoring your body and leaning in a way that presses the uneven lump of clay into a smooth, well-distributed puck. This is often a tough task for beginners, because it really is a you-know-it-when-you-feel-it kind of thing. When you hit the right amount of pressure for the weight of clay you are centering, it feels like all the stars in the universe align. And it’s that physical feeling of the clay clicking into place between your hands that (imo) mirrors the feeling of intuition. Everyone reading this has probably heard me talk about how I can tell immediately when I meet people whether I will like them or not. It isn’t even a first impressions thing, but more of a clicking and fitting together in a way that just feels undeniably right. And the beautiful thing is that even when you spend hours and days and months in a position where things are slightly off-center, you still never fail to recognize when things are a true fit. You can accomplish and experience a lot in mildly ill-fitting careers, friendships, and relationships, but that doesn’t mean you won’t recognize the right fit when it happens. Now whether staying in ill-fitting situations benefits or enables people in other ways that they may value more than finding the right fit is a different question, but I really do believe that people’s gut feelings are omnipotent and omnipresent.
Stability and anchoring: When you pull walls, one of the first reminders is to connect your hands. One hand reaches inside the cylinder while the other glides up the outside, and everyone has a slightly different configuration, but the key is touching the two hands even a tiny bit (i.e., resting your thumb on the back of your other hand) to ensure that they work together to lift the clay simultaneously. Your hands automatically rely on each other to evenly distribute pressure, and while your inside hand’s elbow may be hovering above the piece to pull up, the outside hand is leaned against your thigh, which is solidly anchored to the floor with both feet on the ground. Touch is grounding. Searching for someone’s hand and finding it, laying on the grass and letting your weight fall into the earth, guiding an elbow through a crowd. If exchanging glances is electricity snapping through the air, touching fingertips is water flowing through a channel, smoothing debris and connecting body to body.
Patience and timing: Pottery exists on a spectrum between hydration and desiccation. To shape or glaze a piece, you must intervene at the right point of that spectrum. Throwing the basic shape happens when the clay is wet - water allows you to control the clay. Trimming happens when the clay is dry to the touch, but still flexible enough to bend against metal tools. Firing dries the clay out entirely, leaving it porous and ready to absorb protective, glassy glazes. This all sounds very quantifiable, but as pottery has settled into the world of art rather than science, in practice it involves a lot of gentle taps and loose plastic bags. It’s about the clay being in the right place at the right time. And in pottery, you have control over both. In life, it feels like we have control over neither. We begin life naive and moldable, shaped by our parents and siblings and schoolmates and economics and war and peace and too many -isms to count. We become more rigid as we age and it takes increasing effort to preserve open-mindedness, creativity, and curiosity. The same facts and circumstances would be handled differently by today me than 20 year old me or 10 year old me, but we seemingly have very little control over when certain facts and circumstances present themselves. I wish that I could wrap a plastic bag tightly around my amygdala and take my time shaping my limbic system to guide me away from rumination and risk aversion and towards decisiveness and spontaneity. But the things that made me who I am today happened to me when they did, and in many ways I feel like I’ve spent a significant part of my adult life patching holes and filling dents, trying futilely to make a perfect product out of a bone-dry pot that was bumped after it was thrown. Yet, as my instructor reminds us, the imperfections are signs of life. The imperfections are evidence that human hands shaped the piece, creating beauty in spite of fortunes both good and bad.
I have so much more to say about pottery (it’s definitely all that silence), including way more practical things, if anyone wants to chat. I knew I would love this hobby, but I really didn’t think it would be such a cathartic and meaningful process. I grew up making mud pies out of my mom’s garden and getting yelled at for it - I’m glad that little girl still loves playing with mud.