Blog Post: Potters Wheel

How to begin anything often depends on how we handle endings. Why can that be so hard for us humans? Endings feel so final and yet they give way for new beginnings. I have found it brings up a necessary death of something, but that can make us uncomfortable. Most of us are taught to build a life that is comfortable – through achievement, success, and fitting into what is expected of us – but in doing so, we can sacrifice our dreams, bold ideas, and a call to adventure. Untethering from a life that is known and predictable can be uncomfortable. 

Stepping into the unknown feels like being lost in the woods, heated in the fire of alchemy, floating down a river without a paddle, and the list goes on. It’s exciting and scary at the same time, not either/or, but both. I call it the willingness to live in paradox to find my paradise, not somebody else's version of what life should be. Redefining the rules and re-orienting toward my true north. You know, that inner compass that most of us connect with when we are little and gets slowly confused in the spin of life. Kind of like being in the Bermuda Triangle and spinning around in the same place. That’s my version of hell. Being stuck in a spin and closing down to the journey because I can’t get my bearings. Or sticking to the maps that were laid down by other people. And many of those maps were made from fear, not love. 

I had a defining moment around this when I was a teenager and my hormones were on fire. I was having dinner with my parents and somehow the topic of what my dad did as a teacher came up. He taught art and ceramics, he made beautiful vessels that were all around the house. In my flippant, smart ass way I said that anyone can make them. It is not that hard. My mom challenged me and said well if that's true, how come I had not tried it. I liked a good competition, I was more into winning at that point in my life, the gauntlet was laid down and the games were on. 

We had a potter's wheel in our garage and there were huge bags of raw clay all around. I remember watching my dad take a lump, wet it down, and throw it on the spinning wheel. He would move his hands up and down the sides and start to shape it into something, it took time and eventually it was something I recognized. He had all these cool tools that cut, sliced, and continued to take away the excess that was blocking the form emerging. Then he would have to take it to work and fire it at thousands of degrees to transform it into a solid container.  What I didn’t take in during these observations, was how patient my dad stayed and how messy the process was. I also overlooked how many hours my dad put into his craft and how many times he got it wrong before it turned out right. Basically the transformational, uncomfortable piece of learning anything new. 

It was my turn. I took the lump of mud and threw it on the wheel and it did not center, it flew off onto the ground. What? Ok let's do it again this time it wobbled around for a while as I attempted to create a shape. Nope, another mush-ball of clay. Hmm, another try and that was it. I quit! I had this surge of anger and pain run through me, but I actually felt sad. I wanted to run away and out of the garage, away from how mean I could be to myself. There was nowhere to run and I couldn't hide this crappy feeling I had. But what to do, why was it so big and over a stupid clay mess. I wanted to escape from myself and shut down “Operation Potters Wheel”. Well that wasn’t going to make the spin of pain go away. I was embarking on a new journey toward it. 

I could see the “I told you so” look on my mothers face and my dad had a grin that was subtle and it was humbling. I got checked without being shamed. I remember saying this ceramics thing is not for me. I didn’t like being bad at something and so I gave it up. It was not so much being bad, it was the mean voices inside me that said I was bad. I was uncomfortable with sucking and stopped myself from growing.

It was a great lesson because my parents didn’t impose it upon me, they let me flounder. I shut down learning ceramics because I got caught up in the spin of self beat. I didn’t like feeling vulnerable and doing something badly. Somewhere along the way that meant I was unworthy,  I needed to be good to be accepted and loveable, that narrative was already strong. 

The next step to make the vessel durable is to put it into the kiln. An oven that is fired at incredibly high heat and burns away any remaining water. The temperature transforms it from one state into another. I remember watching my dad put his work in the kiln and wondering if it would survive. Some pieces did not, they couldn't handle the change. They collapsed under the pressure. The metaphor was not lost on me even as a kid. Change is necessary to strengthen and painful because the form of who I once was needs to change to house who I am becoming.  I was heated in that potter's wheel experience, it fired up my inner kiln and I was not ready to step into the fire. But, like all things, the lessons keep coming around and when we are ready we step into the fire and accept the challenge.  

My inability to center the clay, reflected my inability to center myself. My wobbles were shaking me up to the pain of being messy. So much started spinning inside me that it was a mixture of confusion, fear, pain, sadness, anger, and what the hell did that have to do with throwing a pot? It threw me into a tailspin and the emotional life brewing inside became a place I did not trust and I shut down. I give my parents props for not pushing me, it opened a path and they trusted I would find my own way. I was not destined to follow in my fathers footsteps as a potter, but I was learning to create a life that had necessary endings to begin a deeper dialogue within myself. 

I feel like my potters wheel mess, was when I freed myself from the shackles and shame of being messy. I didn’t get it then, but it landed in the mud of my life. It stirred up in my cauldron of alchemy that to be true to soul, I had some fires to walk through. I wasn’t ready then. I knew the dizzying spin when it would come back to me in the form of relationship struggles, self doubt, insecurity, I was learning that without the mud there is no lotus. I may not have become a great ceramicist, but more importantly I was learning how to be the architect and artist of my own life. 

The spin of self doubt on that potter's wheel, stirred up that pain that needed a way to move, a process so it wouldn’t get lodged into a spin that creates more of the same. I kept learning from that day on, I have to soften my self beat voices, hear the hurt, and be open to change. It hurts sometimes but what hurts even more is staying stuck in the clay and never changing shapes. The more willing I have become to let the old versions of who I am die off, shed like a snake,  I have become more at peace and comfortable with who I am. I am not done. I don’t think we ever are while in this vessel. The difference is I welcome it now, even the hard shit because it is fertilizing the flowers to grow.