Healing In the Pots

When I moved up to Maine, in a way, I was going back to Ground Zero. What does it take to live? I wanted to know the minimum, because I had no more stomach for grinding on in life to accumulate more and more. I wanted to find Ground Zero, and then lie down my full length and feel and listen to the heartbeat of the world.

It was a reasonable request. I had nothing to leave behind. I was alone. As soon as I realized where I was headed, I moved fast to where I had to go.

When I got there at Ground Zero, it was the end of summer. To live, I would need a very warm coat and very warm gloves to keep my hands from freezing. I would need a few friends. I would need some real food. One pot. One plate. One spoon. Even a fork would be extra baggage.

At Ground Zero. In that place, I learned about pots, how to make them from clay in the earth.

I didn’t know that my hands were crying until I put them in the clay. At first, they just sat on the clay and wept. They healed from the years I had set them up with a pencil or pen or bade them to be still in my lap. They healed from the hours I had taken the elevator to the 9th floor and plowed my hands through hours of typing out letters. They healed from being advertisements for my product. They healed from being knocked against those solid doors. Ordered to turn on things or turn them off.

They wept and wept until they hit bottom. Then they woke up in the clay.

The clay was moist, and the pressure of my hands shaped it endlessly. I sat there for many hours as the clay moved in my hands. Then my hands began to build upward. The clay went up with my hands. The walls of the pot went up slowly in a circle. I named my first pot, “cup.”

I was not especially interested in using “cup” or accumulating many “cups.” I wanted to experience my hands in the clay and feel the slippery clay yielding. My hands were furling and unfurling. I wanted to make fists and press the clay into a shape different from the last one. I wanted to see how clay behaves. I wanted to know clay the way I had known paper. I wanted to know clay, so that I could come the next day, and without any preliminaries, sink my hands in. Feel at home. My mind cupped into the valley of “cup.” My mind rising over the slope of clay.

I wanted to step out of hours and into “Above Time” where the dance of hands in the clay was effortless. The rhythm I found with the clay brought me above anything I had already named. The new pots I found up there would appear after an undisclosed period of “Above Time” that could have been either 5 minutes or 5 hours.

As I sat this way on a stool up against a wooden work table, a woman came up to me with a cup of mint tea and asked, “Would you like this with honey?”

I saw her hands place the tea in front of me. Her hands. They were different from mine. She was short, and so her hands were smaller than mine. I didn’t know her name, so “Smaller Than My Hands” I called her temporarily.

I saw right away that they were good, caring hands the way they held on to the tea. They were ministering hands. Serving hands. I looked down at my hands. They were serving me well. But were they really serving hands? My hands were much happier than they had ever been, but they were not serving hands.

Her hands and the clay were very old friends. She had gone on from making “cup” to taking her cups, pouring tea in them, and serving them to people. She knew when a warm tea with honey could revive the spirit. She knew about pots. What they can do. How to put inside. How to pour out. She knew, and she had already taught me something of great value, so I named her “big sister friend.”

“Big Sister Friend” never asked me why I made one pot after another. She brought me tea. When the pots were dry on the shelves, she brought glazes to coat the pots so that they could contain liquids without leeching them out. She painted blueberries on her pots. I painted more of the earth. I made my pots into mossy covered rocks, the peeled bark of trees, or sand dunes.
 
She placed my pots beside hers in the kiln and fired them together. Her blueberries sat in my fields. They passed through the fire together. That night while the kiln cooled down after firing and I waited to see my pots, I slept deeply. My hands had finished the job, and I waited. I had done. I was finished doing my first pots.

The kiln was still cooling down when I arrived the next day. My hands were aching for more clay, so I rolled out clay ropes and lay them in a circle. The circle kept getting wider. My mind stood still at the center of the circle and my hands coiled and built.
Then my “big sister friend” came with a tray full of my own finished pots, I looked up from the clay in my hands to the pots on the tray. “Here are your pots.”

I saw they had a life of their own, and I liked them more than anything I owned. They had something real in them besides the clay and the pigments of glaze. I felt whole. Even if the pots were to break, I felt myself a whole vessel. I looked down at my hands. They kept rolling out a coil for my circle of coils.

I hadn’t known what would happen that first day with the clay. I had taken the clay in my hands just for itself, and it had taken me. No one had told me where to go. I had felt the way with my hands. I had heard a very gentle voice, encouraging me to stay in the clay and wait for the pot.

I wanted to celebrate that I had taken a chance and had come out whole. The pots sat before me, just risen out of myself. I had not leafed through pot magazines looking for pots to make or gone to exhibits of pots or made my pots like my teacher’s. Now I felt a whisper of the pots inside of me, still left to do. It was an awesome whisper, and my hands trembled to begin.

         Varda Branfman