Tenmoku heart

You don’t choose to work with clay. It chooses you.
There’s better things to do than turn your time on a spinning wheel, so you leave. And even then, you find yourself, on a cold spring morning after an endless winter, wedging clay, kneading it like mother’s bread, your body weight pressing it with eagerness, even with urgency.
Before you know it, your legs are twisted around the ancient wheel, entwined like legs around a body you love so much, you’re spinning and turning, you’re shape shifting, before you know it, your palms spit out a bowl with frail walls and a thick bottom.

The ways of clay is not something you ever learn. It’s something you re-member, even if you haven’t done it in a hundred years or more, like coming together of forgotten parts. There’s a remembrance in your body, a cellular memory imprinted in your palms, your foot knows the rhythms that clay dances to, the speed with which things come to life, the timing of full aliveness.

You not only remember, you are being remembered by it, by them that spun their livelihoods, that tended to the earth with their hands, by them that weaved stories within thick blankets to keep you warm – there is something that speaks through you, the very thing spoken through them, and here you both meet again.

You try to stop again and again. You see, clay demands a lot of you: your whole body, strength in your back, it demands obedience and full presence, frozen hands stiffened by the cold. It only talks to you through its movements and textures, it whispers only on wet palms and enough water. It demands fire hot enough and tended to, time spent sitting and drying and falling into its form. It needs to see you daily, your fingertip touching to check for its readiness. It demands you wait and wait and wait, hungers for your patience.

No more, I’m done. I’m a writer, I dance with the dawn and words make me and fill me up. I have no time to give to clay, I’m tired of spinning my grief into vessels and making bowls to hold my yearning.

But you do not choose to leave or stay, you do not decide to make something, or create.
You are created, you are the creation, you are chosen, you have no choice but to empty yourself. Empty of thought and intelectualisation, of explanation, of calculi. Empty yourself, be still and listen. And whatever calls you, let yourself be called. Become the poem and the pot, your body clay and your breath prayer, tenmoku heart and blood your offering. The wheel turns your soul to story, the clay holds the songs of ancestors within its moist particles – and here you speak aliveness, and you and words and vessels and ash and root are one and the same, the instrument at the lips of god.