Throwing Clay
Written By Diane Hicks
There in the dark, with stars swimming in and out from under invisible clouds, they lingered in limbo. Sleep had slipped away, on a hiatus of sorts or perhaps just swimming itself through dark caves and sheets of obscurity. That had set the mind to swim in oceans of ideas until at last it came upon an island and dragged itself over the coarse sand to rest a bit and dry out some. Gazing across rippling waters to the horizon, set the mind to thinking. The boy had pondered the possibilities while the girl dreamt a life for herself, the most wonderful life she could imagine.
All night they had thought of what they would like their lives to be. She imagined growing heavenly white wings, thick and sturdy that could carry her across the land. She would never feel stuck again, or held back, or small. She would fly beside Osprey taking in the salt air and the waters below speckled with islands. She would fly high above the flight paths of airplanes through the layers of clouds arcing across the atmosphere, forming the velvety inner space of this planet. She would travel without restraint, smiling over every sundrenched square inch and every dark and dewy enclave.
Shrouded in the calm, undemanding night, the boy thought up so many possibilities. He wanted to be the hero and also to do nothing at all. His mind skipped from paths of notoriety to simply being left alone with all the comforts of life. His sights landed on a car he’d seen once in a magazine. A Lamborghini. The one in the picture had been yellow. He imagined his, the color of a flame. He could see himself driving winding roads beside the ocean, California perhaps. He could feel his hand on the stick shift and his foot on the pedal, the wind in his hair and the salt air in his lungs. He could feel the contentment of just being. Nowhere he had to be, nothing he had to do. He was free.
What is it you have spent the whole night dreaming of? What is it that you want your life to be? We imagine these lives like balls of clay. With some kneading and contemplation they will miraculously become an angel’s wings or an Italian sports car or whatever else we might want. How often have you thrown clay and molded it perfectly, just to have it crack in the kiln? And then what do we do? We start again. “I’m no quitter”, “practice makes perfect”, and other uplifting cliches cross our minds, sustaining us along a path. But where does this path go? It largely depends on how we grip the clay. What is the interplay between our hearts and hands that allows the freedom for this piece to be something different than that predetermined picture we spent the whole night dreaming?
How satisfying it can be to see the way lit up by the stars. How reassuring it is that we have a path and know what comes next. There is no tragedy or sin in this. There is no freedom either. What if the next time we opened the door to the clay closet we found that we had depleted our supply? Looking around the studio we would see the pieces, the many many pieces that were almost right. This one cracked, that one slumped where it should have stood up, that other one never had been quite level, and so on. We could look across the room and the stacks of pottery filling shelves, the throwing table scarred with shards of hardened clay, smeared slip, and the weathering of throwing, molding, shaping, cutting…Can this room hold what comes next? Or is it time to open the door and stand on the steps looking again.
“Just one more,” said the potter. “The next one will be it.” “Just one more,” said the girl who longed for flight and the boy whose hands were lost without the steering wheel and stick shift. “Just one more!” We’ve all said it, begged for it, because everything wasn’t what we’d dreamed and there was a flicker like light refracted by a prism that played with our eyes the way a pesky fly plays with our attention. Eschewed shards of broken dreams catch the sun’s rays here and there, moreso when the clouds are away, and beckon us back to muse about dreams unrequited. This is the fertilizer for the garden of complaint. How often I’ve tended this little patch while letting go of the rest of the world.
My wish for today is to throw clay. I want to feel into the rock of it, the impossibility. I want to slip and fumble before my fingers set in and I find my flow. I want to feel the joy of connection, like a dragonfly lighting on my forearm. I wouldn’t dare to be greedy with that. Instead, I will sit in the lump at my throat and let my hand’s work the magic flowing from my heart. I will allow my imagination the joy of marveling.
