Poetry and Pottery, Similtaneously
It’s like that sometimes, move the hands and you move the mind.
I make a cup of Earth,
She will carry all the mystery or water.
It feels to me that many of us in this ‘modern’ world would do well to learn a craft. There is nothing more humbling than becoming servant to transmutable matter and it is the greatest teacher I know, other than being a parent, of how it is that we may truly learn to care, learn to take care.
It teaches us unrelentingly that we are not the master, but the humble servant. That the master is and always will be, the life force behind the matter. That with time we may slowly learn the right mix of elemental fusion, to allow the material to be given life between our hands, to show us it’s capacity of form and eloquence of being, but that this will only happen when we lay aside our brute force and learn that anything worth doing is always, utterly, an expression of our love and an utterance of our care. It is a happenstance of mystery and contains our forebearance for the way life will be made and unmade between the hands of human forever, and what a precious blessing it is, to be made and unmade and made again by the forces that lie beneath and between and within and all around us.
There is a forging of instinct that happens and a honing of will, our animal intelligence is asked of us. Our capacity to learn the invisible threads that weave a thing into being and hold it in place. The way that all of life makes a thing so. The way it is a relationship. Every thing, a relationship.
It teaches us that every single gesture matters, every single gesture either makes a thing less tenable or more beautiful, makes the world less secure, or more comforting. That this is how we can come to matter, in our capacity to nurture life into form, spirit into matter. Such a profound and humbling privilege, it undoes us from the inside out, and makes us anew.
The person who can take a raw material and make a thing of beauty, knows these things in their bones.
Words and image Copyright Lucy Pierce 2022
