I have friends who I spent hours with making pottery.
Yesterday I left off all my potting supplies at the pottery studio. I had double parked, so just dropped the big box at the end of a table, and saw two old friends. But I didn't stay to explain or talk.
I'm not able to relate to these old pottery friends very well. I know they wanted to connect, at least Cindi would have liked to, but I worried about the car.
That's what I told myself.
I also worried about my grieving process. She and I would have ended up in a hug. So why did I just avoid that? Well, probably because these friends were "in the studio only" friends. Never did lunch or coffee with them. Never saw them after I quit (during and after the pandemic until the year I tried going back,) so they only existed in connection with my being there and creating with clay.
We all got to know each other's lives pretty much while talking and dipping glazes, or pushing and pulling clay on a wheel. At a certain level anyway. A good acquaintance-ship. Not really friends. No going home to each other's place.
I felt that way anyway.
But the place did hold many memories...when one spends hours creatively, I felt the emotions of my life coming out in the clay. And then there are the emotions that happen when my created pieces work well, or fail completely. Hours spent in pursuit of beauty, trying to speak the feelings so others could also experience them...and then they might crack, or the glaze run, or someone else's pot explodes and sticks all over a beautiful piece.
So I kept a couple of those failures to remind me of how hopeful I'd been. One is a plate that was fired in the glaze kiln but someone else's piece exploded, and so there's a shard stuck in the middle of the finished plate. I use it under a flower pot. Another is the lid with a painted bee on it, where the teapot had flowing glaze which stuck to the kiln shelf, and had kiln wash stuck all over the foot of it so it was destroyed.
Yes I cried sometimes when something failed.
And I continued to look at several poorly made pieces for many days, months or years, just because I'd thought and worked so hard to have them be beautiful...before finally admitting to myself that they needed to be trashed. When packing my pottery that I'd lived with here on my apartment's shelves, I took a good third of them to the hammer.
I would spend a couple of hours every day the studio was open making something or another. And up till the pandemic it offered at least 2 hours, and sometimes 4 a day that I could go throw, hand-built, or glaze creations in clay. (My blog Alchemy of Clay has lots of my old pottery from then.)
Pottery was a very good way for me to live for 12 years after retirement.
So now I'm letting it all go. Except for the 10 boxes of pottery that are already packed for my next adventure.
