gentle persistence

I’ve been desperate to build walls.*

Of the many activities I tried while writing my book, the one I’ve most fallen in love with is pottery. I’ll admit that when I first started, I assumed that it would be far easier than it actually is. It turns out that creating a pot is a really technical affair: you first have to wedge the clay (which is ceramicist-talk for kneading it until all the air bubbles are out), then the clay has to be centered on the wheel (which means that as the wheel is spinning, the clay doesn’t end up looking wonky), and finally, you have to open the clay and build the walls of the vessel.

In the six-week class I took in early summer, my classmates and I would joke that pottery is an exercise in heartbreak. Some couldn’t center the clay to save their lives, destining them to a lifetime of wonky pots. Still others would build beautiful walls, only to have them collapse. Another person had their lump of clay fly completely off the wheel.** And whenever we felt like we’d mastered a skill, some new challenge would pop up.

As for me, wedging and centering, I could do. Opening? Sure. But until this weekend, building walls was a joke.

For the past five months, all I’ve been able to build are little dog bowls. I’d center the clay, open it, and suddenly experience some sort of neurological event that kept me from pulling the walls to anything more than about three centimeters high. It has been incredibly frustrating, this inability to make any wheel-throwing progress, and it has been exacerbated by the fact between speaking gigs and book deadlines, I’ve only been able to return to the studio once every three weeks or so. I mean, I’ve been making the best of them: Soca already has a dog bowl, so I’ve been using my sad little works for candles or for my yogurt. But really, there are only so many yogurt bowls one person can have. So I’ve been busy scouring YouTube for wheel-throwing videos, and asking the folks who work at the pottery studio for help.

And finally — finally — this weekend I threw a few pots with walls. No longer dog bowls, these are now vessels.

To be fair, these are obviously not perfect vessels. They each have, as one might say here in Texas, a little hitch in their giddy-up: a bulge here, and a wobble there. But they are decidedly not bowls, and they even resemble something you might actually drink a liquid out of. I’ve been very proud of them, showing photos of them to anyone who would slow down enough to listen. But the most exciting part hasn’t been showing the final results to folks who knew I’d been struggling. It was the moment I realized that I was finally pulling a substantial wall.

Because while pottery might be an exercise in heartbreak, it can also be a lesson in joy: there’s nothing like the moment when you’re fully immersed in what you’re doing, moving slowly and deliberately, and suddenly you feel the clay give in to your intentions. You’re going along, doing what you’ve always done, but making some minor adjustments — adding some pressure here, easing off there. You move slowly, and intentionally, and with gentle persistence, knowing that moving too fast could cause the entire thing to collapse (or, ahem, fly off the wheel). And then, suddenly, miraculously, the clay moves in the way you hoped. And then you realize that as goes clay, so goes life: in moving slowly, intentionally, making minor adjustments as needed and with gentle persistence, often the thing you’re working toward or the challenge you’re trying to overcome suddenly, miraculously clicks into place.

It’s a lovely feeling.