unexpected potterer

Of all the things I've intentionally crafted over all my life, none has been as challenging & fulfilling as making myself a vessel.  Over the years, the materials of my vessel has changed & life events carved their image on my surface.  Year after year, I've kept throwing it back on the wheel, feeling the carved images blend back into the supple clay, then refashion the piece into something increasingly open & even beautiful. 

Will it ever go into the kiln?  I don't know.  My birth religion says it will, but I am not at all sure.  Maybe all that will happen is I'll get a different beginning slab of clay & start the process all over again, albeit from a different perspective.  

It's fun, looking back over the years at my efforts.  Wedging the clay to evenly distribute the moisture, aligning particles for greater suppleness.  The YEARS of setting the clay down on perfect center.  Coning the clay upward, then back down, increasing even more the particles are in the right place for working it into a new vessel, taking the care to ensure the clay always stays on perfect center, or see it go whipping off into a mangled mess.  It takes a committed heart, two steady hands & at least one guiding finger to open up the clay.  And a lot of water, or the piece will self-destruct.  

A real vessel has to be kiln dried.  My vessel isn't but receives all the same.  The more open it is to receiving, the more can flow in.  

It's beyond my understanding to explain - even to myself - how I knew from my earliest days that my most important project was to craft a vessel capable of receiving what flowed in.  And knowing that it would require a lot of emptying out of what was already received in order to be available for the next influx.  

I can't take any bows for my relationship with John.  Maybe a little one for not rejecting that something remarkable was entering my life, for realizing that what was flowing in was the very essence of everything I'd honored respected valued.  But I can & happily do take happy credit for keeping working away at the vessel that received his love.  

We are all creative, all created in the image of the Divine, the greatest creative force of all.  We are all called to craft ourself into a vessel that can receive incredible things, things impossibly outside our time-  & space-bound imaginations.  

The best things in my life flowed in through infinitely larger forces utterly outside my will or doing, finding welcome in my prepared & waiting space.  Every day, I am grateful for all that my vessels have received over all my years, even when they were very small with mega shallow indentations, not the HUGE bowl of my most recent incarnation.  

A description of throwing clay could just as readily be read as a description for fashioning ourselves as vessels - "Be prepared for a fine adventure, for clay is as deep and as broad as the earth it comes from."