[Reverb10, Day 3: Prompt: Moment. Pick one moment during which you felt most alive this year. Describe it in vivid detail (texture, smells, voices, noises, colors).]

I am in my studio.  Dust motes swim in the light where the sun flows in the window.  The musty smell of wet earth wafts through the air.

Before me is a slab of clay rolled to 3/8 inch thick.  The new clay, when reworked, tends to bubble (they have taken all the talc out.  I don’t know why this makes bubbles but it does).  And the bubbles don’t give up with one smoothing.  I move to husband’s side of the studio (it’s actually the garage, but hey, it works!) and turn on his overhead light so that I can see more clearly where the bubbles are hiding.  A missed bubble can explode the clay in the kiln by trapping air.  An exploded, glazed piece can stick to lots of other pieces.  You can lose a lot of creativity by trapped struggling energy.

I run my hands across the cool wetness of the clay slab to feel for what my eyes may miss.  It feels right.  Before me spreads possibilities.  What this time?  The thinness narrows my choices.  When I create wall sculptures, I use 1/2 to 5/8 inch thickness.  This thin work is new.  It is good for sea nettles ( a new line this year) or jewelry focals. 

In the quiet, I don’t even have voices in my head.  They all go to sleep when I am making art.    I cast around for templates:  the top of a jar, the bottom of a bowl, something I handcut myself.  Nothing like cookie cutters! 

Before I cut, I decorate the slab – if I decorate after I cut, the edges go mushy and thinner yet.  I choose a rolling stamp and roll it for several columns.  Now all I have to do is decide shapes and whether or not they’ll be whole or holed.

Decisions are made intuitively.  I trust my hands and my body to tell me what is next.  When I am with my art, be it clay, or jewelry, or painting or drawing or even writing, I am in that very moment.  I am open to energy that is attracted to creativity.  And I believe that what comes through me is being called into being not by me but by someone who is even now looking for it (even if they don’t know).  My piece of this puzzle is to be the conduit – to get the abstract into the concrete

 and then get it out into the world so that whoever called it can find it.

I am, in other words, a midwife to energy.  That is my art’s gift to me – to see things born for the first time.  To bring into being things that never were before.  To leave my fingerprints in the soft clay which fires to hard, to make the metal bend just so, to accrue hard stone and glittery crystal and bring everything together so that it is as unique as the person calling it.  Grace. Over and over each time I open to the impulse to make something.

Here are some other things I’ve learned.  Sometimes you can do everything right and the clay still explodes in the kiln.  Sometimes you can really push the clay to the edges of what you know should work and a bit beyond and something amazing happens.  Broken pieces aren’t trash – you can put them back together in a different configuration and make something even more beautiful.  Remade jewelry and refashioned shards of fired clay show me how what is healed is even stronger and more wonderful than the first iteration.  It reminds me that I can remake myself as many times as I want – that all the pieces will fit back together and sometimes surprise me with what has opened up.

Wylde Womens Wisdom

Nothing every goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.  It just keeps returning with new names, forms, and manifestations until we learn whatever it has to teach us about where we are separating ourselves from reality, how we are pulling back instead of opening up, closing down instead of alowing ourselves to experience fully whateer we encounter, without hesitating or retreating into ourselves.  To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.  Pema Chodron