primalmommy on thu 8 dec 05
I come from German stone-cutters whose work stands in cathedrals. They
came through Ellis island, ran hotels and taverns, established
themselves in businesses. Also Irish potato diggers who came through
Ellis Island during the potato famine, worked as coal miners and farmed
the land. My chances of being built like anything but peasant stock were
slim. I don't know if it's genetics or a family traditon, but "work
ethic" is just part of the picture for my family.
This part of year is hard for us, maybe for everyone -- no fresh air, no
black dirt or green leafy dome, waning sunlight, general blues and
nervous energy. We work through it. I have to suspect that the Christian
and pre-Christian celebrations this time of year (solstice, Hanukkah,
Divali, etc.) have served us well in introducing some kind of light
(Christmas lights, menorah candles, Divali lights, yule fires) but
mostly by keeping us all busy, meditative and grateful, distracted and
diverted in the days before the sun begins to return. It always seemed
cruel to me that winter solstice is considered the first day of winter.
I rather consider it the day when winter's back is broken -- the sun
starts creeping in a few seconds earlier every dawn.
Multi tasking: I know it is not the best choice. It was lovely to nurse
that baby in the rocking chair, focused on baby's smell and sounds and
the peace of it all, rather than nurse at the computer keyboard -- but
sometimes you have to choose both.
I would love to have entire days in the studio to make 20, trim 20,
decorate 20, bisque 20, glaze 20, fire 20, wrap 20, ship 20. But for now
I will have to fit clay into my life as I can manage to, running out for
an hour here and there when everybody's occupied or on track, or going
out after the kids are in bed and working until 3am if I need a quiet
expanse of time.
But my own time is coming, and I know it. My first baby is some tall
stranger already, moving in a wider and wider orbit, finding his own
world at 12. I sometimes ache for the day I can choose when to entertain
the voices and needs of others, and when to close the studio door and
let it roll. I would not speed up time, though, and while I know that I
am half-missing the zen moment of peeling sweet potatoes if I am also
counseling a homeschooler on the phone, both seem necessary and neither
has the manners to wait until I am feeling centered and inspired.
Singularity of focus can be a luxury.
No wonder my work is cluttered and schitzophrenic ;0)
And there is a difference between 'hands busy' and "mind busy". My kids
have learned that. If I am throwing repetitive forms, you can sit down
and tell me your stories and dreams and problems. If I am writing on the
computer or doing the household budget, DO NOT INTERRUPT unless the
house is on fire, because my mind is busy.
I will admit that when I am done and take my rest, I rest. Hammock in
summer, bathtub in winter, or a Lark book and a blanket and my papa-san
chair. I don't understand the need some have to go from a frenetic paced
day, wherein their thoughts are not their own -- to the frenetic blabla
of television. That kind of rest would never recharge my batteries. I
know I miss some good entertainment, information and connection with the
larger world by not watching TV, but frankly, if I didn't jettison
something I couldn't keep this balloon afloat.
In the studio there is some work that is just hands-busy work. In fact,
on long drives, or making little things at the kitchen table, I think I
sometimes I surpass myself, in the way that some of my best designs are
doodles, scribbled distractedly in margins at long guild meetings or UU
sermons. If I sit down with a drawing pad determined to
think/plan/design, the pressure to be brilliant sometimes freezes me up,
or I produce something contrived. My best stuff sneaks up on me when I
am not paying attention. It's like the silliness about scheduling
'quality time' with children -- you can't schedule the moment they will
first take a step, discover a joy or a mystery, wonder about death, or
speak their first word. It happens in the middle of a busy life, without
warning, and it's nice to have the flexibility to stop the world and
focus when it (unpredictably) happens.
The other beauty of a million tasks, overlapping and interwoven, is that
when you peel potatoes with your potter brain plugged in, you see shino
orange with marshmallow crawl, think lidded casserole for baking, dream
boat forms and tapers and internal grain. When you teach ancient history
to kids and then head for the studio, you plan celestial navigation
devices and layered artifacts and canopic jars. My morning coffee cup,
the beetle my son draws, the peanut butter I spread, the grout I thumb
between tiles behind my woodstove, the way I pinch my pie crust shut,
the greens I cut for a wreath on the door, all weave themselves into one
big creative work of art -- some of it fun, some of it drudgery, just
like the studio. As if my home were the one big pot that's my life work,
lidded with a rooftop, and I'm never done working out the details.
About boats: Mine are not pots reminiscent of boats, they are stoneware
boats -- gunwales, planked sides, carved details and a deep v-hull. I
learned to ski behind a wooden Chris Craft boat, and spent half my life
in canoes and kayaks and rafts and rowboats. My boat only has a cozy
seat for one.. it's my reach ahead to a world of mono-tasking, a frog's
eye view of the lake. There is a fleet of them in the studio, and some
sold at the holiday sales -- perched on a curled bow-wave stand. It has
neither telephone nor radio nor intercom nor clock.
When my children are upset or hurt (or getting stitches, or waking from
a nightmare) and need help calming themselves, we ask them to do the
"bunny breathing" they learned in yoga -- sniff sniff sniff haaaaa.....
and think of a calm, peaceful, happy place. Mine is this boat.
Our veterans: I am forever grateful to our veterans and our military. In
the terrifying days after 9-11 when the only planes in the air were
fighter jets, I told my terrified children that they were watching over
country and keeping us safe, and we were lucky to have soldiers and
firefighters and police officers and ambulance drivers who were brave
enough to do things like that.
I also think we owe our soldiers and their families the sacred duty
never to spend lives if there is any other way. I hold out my hope that
one day the human race will evolve past the need for violence to resolve
differences. I am a peacenik who supports our troops and wants them
home, whole and safe, with their loved ones. When people send holiday
cards wishing peace on earth everbody smiles.. but my peace bumper
sticker gets me dirty looks. Funny world.
Yours
Kelly in Ohio... on a chilly grey morning.
_______________________________________________________________
Get the FREE email that has everyone talking at http://www.mail2world.com
Unlimited Email Storage – POP3 – Calendar – SMS – Translator – Much More!
Hank Murrow on thu 8 dec 05
On Dec 8, 2005, at 8:24 AM, primalmommy wrote:
> It's like the silliness about scheduling 'quality time' with children
> -- you can't schedule the moment they will first take a step, discover
> a joy or a mystery, wonder about death, or speak their first word. It
> happens in the middle of a busy life, without warning, and it's nice
> to have the flexibility to stop the world and focus when it
> (unpredictably) happens.
Well, David Whyte was not there when his wife noticed their son's first
steps......but one might say he 'made a meal of it' anyway. Here is his
poem about it, hawkshead Churchyard being the childhood haunt of
Wordsworth. One of my faves:
FIRST STEPS IN HAWKSHEAD CHURCHYARD
My son strode out into the world today,
twenty one steps on the grave of Ann Braithwaite,
her horizontal slab of repose grey beneath
the lifting red socks, her exit from the world
his entrance to the world of walking.
She must have lain beneath and smiled past
the small arms outstretched to the church tower of Hawkshead,
she must have borne him up, her help from the end of life
his beginning, her hands invisible, reaching to his.
He walked through each line explaining her life,
sixty two years by the small lake of Esthwaite,
lichen, green grass, grey walls and the falling
water of ice cold streams, his small place of play
her mingling with the elements she lived with.
A meeting of two waters,
hers a deep pool, solitary in stillness,
his swift, bubbling from rock to rock,
pouring into her silence, a kingfisher
flare in her darkness, promise of light,
Ineffable, unknowable, the touch of his feet
a promise of a world to come, solid on a life well lived.
His look of surprise when the church bell rang, her knowing.
The sound of time, his now, hers then. New rituals
are always played on the graves of those long dead.
Off topic........ or is it?
Cheers All,
Hank in Eugene
www.murrow.biz/hank
Steve Slatin on thu 8 dec 05
Let me bore you with some irrelevant asides here ... my recent sensitivity
to this stems from my living in a fixed location where I can see the sun rise
and set with no buildings in the way for the first time since I was a child.
In the northern hemisphere the sun visibly draws away, and days are
shorter and colder as the winter solstice approaches. Then there are
a few days where you can't see the difference and, gradually, it rises
more to the north and the days are longer. Every clear day is a
particular joy because even though winter has begun, when it's clear
you can be comfortable outside (OK, for folks in the great plains of
Canada and such this may not apply). The coldest weather is yet
to come, but you can already see the promise of spring.
The day of the solstice wavers a bit in the calendar, though we
normally claim the 21st. Our best calendars are still part sun, part
moon in origin. Various traditions have found ways of spotting
the solstice, though. In the Orkneys there's a site called Maeshowe
that carbon-dates to 5000 years ago with a long tunnel going into
a stone cairn that illuminates to the very back of the cairn with
the light of the rising sun on only one day of the year -- the solstice.
(There's another site in eastern Ireland even older said to do the
same. I can't remember its name.)
Chichen Itza aligns with the solstice. One of the sites at
Angkor Wat is suposed to do the same, I can't say as I've never
been able to visit or find good pictures, even.
Religious traditions that include birth traditions that are assigned to
the day of the solstice include the Zoroastrians (Shab-e-Yalda) where
the sun itself has a birth, the Osiris cult, which celebrated a death
and rebirth on the solstice, Helios (there's an obvious one), Mithra
(who preceded Zoroaster's reforms in Persia), and Dionysus,
where a symbolic man was ripped to pieces and eaten raw by
a band of women on the solstice to be replaced by a newborn
child, who must certainly have felt uneasy on learning his part
in the ritual (this is repeated in the play "The Bacchae" in later,
classic Greece. (By the classic period it was consider wrong to
sacrifice an actual man, and a goat was used instead.) And
Buddha achieved enlightenment, escaping the cycle of death
and rebirth so close to the solstice that a connection is hard
to avoid.
The light returns. The sun is reborn (don't know how many languages
the pun works in). The promise of warmth and, eventually,
fertility, even before the worst of winter is already visible.
We may do our work in the confident assurance that nature
itself has not turned on us, that we will be cold, but later we
will be warm again. We may get hungry, but we will be fed
again. Despair is relieved, we are reassured.
-- Steve Slatin
primalmommy wrote:
nervous energy. We work through it. I have to suspect that the Christian
and pre-Christian celebrations this time of year (solstice, Hanukkah,
Divali, etc.) have served us well in introducing some kind of light
(Christmas lights, menorah candles, Divali lights, yule fires) but
mostly by keeping us all busy, meditative and grateful, distracted and
diverted in the days before the sun begins to return.
Steve Slatin --
And I've seen it all, I've seen it all
Through the yellow windows of the evening train...
---------------------------------
Yahoo! Shopping
Find Great Deals on Holiday Gifts at Yahoo! Shopping
Victoria E. Hamilton on sun 11 dec 05
Hank -
Thank you for this. Beautiful, and very moving.
Vicki Hamilton
Millennia Antica Pottery
Seattle, WA
-----Original Message-----
From: Clayart [mailto:CLAYART@LSV.CERAMICS.ORG] On Behalf Of Hank Murrow
Sent: Thursday, December 08, 2005 11:06
To: CLAYART@LSV.CERAMICS.ORG
Subject: Re: multitasking and history
On Dec 8, 2005, at 8:24 AM, primalmommy wrote:
> It's like the silliness about scheduling 'quality time' with children
> -- you can't schedule the moment they will first take a step, discover
> a joy or a mystery, wonder about death, or speak their first word. It
> happens in the middle of a busy life, without warning, and it's nice
> to have the flexibility to stop the world and focus when it
> (unpredictably) happens.
Well, David Whyte was not there when his wife noticed their son's first
steps......but one might say he 'made a meal of it' anyway. Here is his
poem about it, hawkshead Churchyard being the childhood haunt of
Wordsworth. One of my faves:
FIRST STEPS IN HAWKSHEAD CHURCHYARD
My son strode out into the world today,
twenty one steps on the grave of Ann Braithwaite,
her horizontal slab of repose grey beneath
the lifting red socks, her exit from the world
his entrance to the world of walking.
She must have lain beneath and smiled past
the small arms outstretched to the church tower of Hawkshead,
she must have borne him up, her help from the end of life
his beginning, her hands invisible, reaching to his.
He walked through each line explaining her life,
sixty two years by the small lake of Esthwaite,
lichen, green grass, grey walls and the falling
water of ice cold streams, his small place of play
her mingling with the elements she lived with.
A meeting of two waters,
hers a deep pool, solitary in stillness,
his swift, bubbling from rock to rock,
pouring into her silence, a kingfisher
flare in her darkness, promise of light,
Ineffable, unknowable, the touch of his feet
a promise of a world to come, solid on a life well lived.
His look of surprise when the church bell rang, her knowing.
The sound of time, his now, hers then. New rituals
are always played on the graves of those long dead.
Off topic........ or is it?
Cheers All,
Hank in Eugene
www.murrow.biz/hank
____________________________________________________________________________
__
Send postings to clayart@lsv.ceramics.org
You may look at the archives for the list or change your subscription
settings from http://www.ceramics.org/clayart/
Moderator of the list is Mel Jacobson who may be reached at
melpots@pclink.com.
| |
|
