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Transcript
- The first time I touched cold clay after my father died, my hands didn’t know what to do with their own weight. It felt less like art and more like an emergency landing. There is a specific kind of silence that lives in a pottery studio. It isn’t empty. It’s heavy. It’s the sound of wet earth waiting for your fingerprints to tell it who it’s supposed to be. I remember sitting on that stool last autumn, the air smelling faintly of dust and damp wool, staring at a lump of gray stoneware on the wheel. My father had been gone for three weeks. The funeral was over, the casseroles had stopped arriving, and the world had started spinning back into its usual, irritating rhythm. But inside me? I was still standing in the hallway, watching him tie his shoelaces one last time, wondering if he’d remembered to lock the back door. I wanted to hold something. Not a memory, not a photo, but something real. Something that resisted me. Grief has this cruel way of making you feel untethered, like you’re floating away from your own body. And so, I went to the studio. I put my hands into that cool, slick mud and waited for the magic. Or at least, for some sign that the universe hadn’t completely abandoned us to our own chaotic thoughts. What I found instead was friction. Real, physical, undeniable friction. Let’s dig into the velvet here, because people love to romanticize healing. They talk about flowers blooming in spring or sun breaking through clouds. But grief doesn’t always bloom. Sometimes it just sits there, stubborn and dense, like a rock in your shoe. Clay is honest in a way that language rarely is. You cannot lie to wet earth. If your hands are trembling, the wall of your pot will wobble. If you’re holding back, afraid to push too hard, the clay collapses inward. It refuses to take shape unless you commit. I spent hours trying to center a bowl. Centering is that moment where the spinning lump stops fighting you and aligns with the axis of the wheel. It requires pressure, yes, but also surrender. You have to press down with your palms, steady and firm, while letting the momentum do the work. At first, I kept pulling my hands away, scared of ruining it. Scared of making a mess. And every time I hesitated, the clay spun off-center, flinging little shards of gray sludge onto the floor. It was messy. It was frustrating. It was exactly what I needed. What’s the texture of this? Is it smooth? Or is it rough, full of grit? When we grieve, we often try to smooth things out. We want to get back to normal. We want to polish the edges of our pain until they shine and fit neatly into conversation at dinner parties. But clay teaches you that texture is necessary. If you sand a pot too much before it’s fired, you lose the evidence of your touch. You lose the story of how it was made. My hands were covered in slip, that milky mixture of water and clay, and I realized I was using my anger as leverage. Every time I thought about how unfair it was that he wouldn’t be there to see my birthday next month, I pressed harder. I forced the walls up. And strangely, that pressure helped. It gave me a boundary. In life, grief feels formless, like smoke filling a room. But in the potter’s wheel, it has dimensions. Height, width, thickness. I could measure it. I could hold it. For twenty minutes at a time, I wasn’t thinking about death. I was thinking about whether the base was thick enough to support the weight of the rim. It was a small thing, but it was solid. Then comes the kiln. This is the part of the process that scares me most, honestly. Because once you put your creation inside, you close the door, and you turn up the heat to two thousand degrees Fahrenheit. You leave it there for twelve hours. You cannot check on it. You cannot save it if it cracks. You have to trust that the fire will transform the fragile, dried clay into something permanent. Something stone-hard. It reminded me of the finality of loss. There is no going back. The person you were before they left is gone, fired into ash. The person you are now is being formed in that heat. It hurts. The heat is intense. But without it, the clay remains soft, easily damaged by a drop or a bump. The fire gives it strength. I watched the temperature gauge climb, my heart pounding in sync with the cooling fans. I wondered if my bowl would survive. I wondered if I would. We both looked fragile before we entered that chamber. But survival isn’t about staying unchanged. It’s about becoming something that can withstand the heat. Tell me more about that feeling. The feeling of picking up a piece of broken pottery, knowing it’s yours, knowing you made it when you were shaking. Some of my pieces cracked. A few shattered completely. I sat on the studio floor amidst the debris, sweeping up jagged edges, and I felt a surge of shame. Why couldn’t I do it right? Why couldn’t I hold it together? But then I remembered kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken ceramics with gold lacquer. The idea isn’t to hide the break, but to highlight it. To say that this crack is part of the history. Part of the beauty. I didn’t have gold lacquer, but I had understanding. I swept the shards into a pile, not as trash, but as evidence. Evidence that I tried. Evidence that I stayed with the process even when it fell apart. We don’t heal by becoming unbreakable. We heal by learning how to carry our fractures with grace. The pot may never hold water again, but it can still hold meaning. I’m still making pots. Some days they come out perfect, symmetrical, beautiful enough to display on a shelf. Other days they look like lumps of coal, misshapen and awkward. And I keep coming back to the wheel. Not because I’m good at it, but because it keeps my hands busy when my mind wants to spiral. It grounds me in the present moment, in the smell of the earth, in the resistance of the material. If you are grieving, or if you are carrying a weight that feels too large to name, consider finding your own version of the wheel. It doesn’t have to be pottery. It can be gardening, knitting, coding, writing terrible poetry. It can be anything that requires your hands and asks for your focus. Find something that resists you gently. Something that demands your presence. Let yourself make a mess. Let yourself fail. Let yourself be imperfect. Because in those moments of struggle, you are not alone. You are connected to every human who has ever tried to shape chaos into something bearable. You are part of the long, messy, beautiful tradition of making things with your hands when words aren’t enough. Keep your hands dirty, my friends. I’ll be here next week, ready to listen to whatever texture you bring to the table. Until then, be gentle with yourselves. You’re doing better than you think. Bye for now.