Made With Love, hand and slab built ceramic wall sculpture, approx 24" tall, by Tammy Vitale

Here is the final version of the pregnant torso, which, as you can see, now has a name.  Her name, Made with Love, comes from her belly heart charm which says that very same thing.  Over a spiral of life.

She has been on a journey.  Here she is drying, then fired.  You can see things have changed.  Now the real focus is on her belly,   which is where it should have been all along.  Once she was on her way to formed, she knew better than I when I was first making her.  And once she was in her own final form, her name came.

I have learned not to fight this.  To fight where the energy wants to go is just crazy making.  Ultimately, it will go where it wants.  This is the marvelous beauty of clay.  I am a midwife.  Some days it’s pretty spectacular. 

There is a process here that brings me back time and again to myself.  I have an idea (not necessarily to do with clay; an idea about where I’m going, say).  I head out.  I almost get there, or, in some cases, arrive just where I thought I wanted to be only to have something shift.  Because I have become attached to a particular outcome of a particular idea, that shift isn’t always welcome.  It has taken me a long time to recognize that in the interstices of transition, great gifts are born.  Clay teaches me to take a breath, not get rattled, and wait patiently for what is trying to emerge.  It is an on-going process.  Some days I remember to take the breath.  Other days I remember, but only after I’m red in the face from exertion without taking a breath.  When Husband and I worked together in live sound – loading in our PA system, doing a gig, and loading out again (one a night, sometimes after one in the day) – he used to always have to remind me to breath when I was lifting.  Same thing.  And with Husband, the end of the gig, when we were wrapping up microphone cords and putting things away, we would always get giddy.  Some of it was exhaustion.  Some was knowing the hard part was over and we could rest.  These are the things I try to remember when change sparkles in the air.

For your enjoyment, here are the final pictures of Mayan Artifact with a close up of her breast crystals and belly turquoise.  And a new mask, Contemplation (I’m not real sure that name is going to stick).

thought for the day:  To paraphrase Sun Tzu in his Art of War, when the going gets tough, the tough do not get going; they disappear, only to reappear again, renewed and reimagined.

…What you can plan is too small for you to live.  To be human is to become visible while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others….

It is the reimagining of ourselves in our private time that allows us to then reshape ourselves in conversation with the world.  David Whyte, Crossing the Unknown Sea:  Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity