Today, I share a post about life: unmasked, a blog meme started by my sensational friend, Joy.
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Woe unto him that striveth with his Maker! Let the potsherd strive with the potsherds of the earth. Shall the clay say to him that fashioneth it, What makest thou? or thy work, He hath no hands?
-- Isaiah 45:9
Clay fights you. In ceramics yesterday we entered our second day of throwing on the potter's wheel, a process that I thought for much of my life was relatively simple. It's not. It's quite hard. You wet the wheel gently as it spins, stop it, take a lump of clay and form it with care into a ball in your hands, then trust in the power of angels and God's providence of gravity that when you smack it down on the wheel, it will be close to center.
It's never perfectly center.
It takes the handling, slow and deliberate, left hand against the left wall and right hand over the top pressing down, feeling in your arms and thighs the way the clay moves, wobbles and dances, until in the midst of your hands comes the moment of epiphany. Wobbles stop, clay slips quietly against cupped hands, and you have found the center.
Then comes the rest of the work. One finger pokes into the middle to form a hole which is slowly pushed to the bottom. A cup, a bowl, an urn, a vase, all begun by the single intrusion of one finger into the midst of the clay. There's a trick though, in that the clay fights you. The clay doesn't want the hole, the clay doesn't want to be centered. Slowly it starts to warp, push out, and you need your other hand to be against the outer wall as you push in, keeping the clay in the center, always in the center, or else the pot warps. Sometimes the pressure against it must be so soft, you barely feel it. Sometimes you have to press hard, perhaps too hard, and you think for a moment you've lost the shape entirely as it groans against your discipline and slashes at your hands.
Once the hole is made, hands are free to brush against inner and outer wall, carefully moving in tandem, pulling out and up, forming interior, exterior, width, height. All the while the clay fights you. It wants to move from its center, it wants to warp itself and spin freely. But it makes a horrible pot if you just let the clay go. You, as the potter, know this; you feel it between your hands, you intimately know the clay even better than it knows itself, because you have in mind what it is supposed to be. But it fights. It wants to be something else. And it's all you can do just to keep it in the center, never mind all the other myriad shapes and forms you might hope it to take once it gets there and stays.
It's slow work. Every action is painfully deliberate, quiet, purposed.
And I am like this clay. The fight is not what I become. The fight is to keep me in the Center.
Because I fight the Potter. Because I think I know. And all this while, I keep straying from simply being Centered.
Interesting thing about throwing on a wheel--there comes a point when you can't change the clay any more without destroying it. You've used all the water you can, opened it so wide, pulled it so far, you have to let it go. Another touch would cripple the whole thing. You step back. You accept it. Off-center, warped, a vessel of wrath. It wanted to be something else, it wanted so badly to not be in the center. Eventually, because it had gone so very far, after you had tried so very gently to keep bringing it back, you have to give it over to itself.
Another thing, a more important thing: it hurts the hands of the potter. Clay has so many disparate particle sizes within it that it cuts against the flesh of your skin as you try to mold it. You walk away chaffed, scratched, wounded by the very beauty you are trying to create. Ever so often, a particularly large particle breaks through and it seems that your hand has been pierced. And it stays with you. The scratches and the chaffing redden your hands and repetitions of lotion only take you so far, can only be repeated so many times.
Because, the hard and simple fact is, you have to accept the hurt if you want to make a pot.
Our Potter accepted the hurt. Pierced hands and all. And His hands are on this earthenware life, pulling back and pushing in, ever and always to Center.
And today, I am leaving so very many prayers and questions behind. I am asking, simply, quietly, achingly--
Bring me back to Center, for I trust the hands of the Potter.
Bring me back to Center, for I trust the hands of the Potter.
Bring me back to Center, for only the Potter makes common clay into art.
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It is my joy, with Joy, to share here words that expose life honestly, openly, and messily. Some days my posts for this meme are about this chaos of being, other days I manage a bit more gentle words.Would you join us in sharing the vulnerable times, the unordered times, the unkempt rooms?
