Hi, it's Chai.
In a previous entry, I wrote about how I started playing with clay to (a) have better work-life balance, (b) get comfortable with taking risks and failing and (c) explore and cultivate multiple facets of my identity beyond my career. Clay did not fail me - all three of these things are still big reasons I love clay.
As I've continued on this journey into pottery though, I've discovered many other reasons to love clay, and I've decided to continue this blog entry in a more unorthodox way of writing a Gratitude Letter to Clay. Writing Gratitude Letters have been shown in research to increase peoples happiness in the long-term, especially when they are delivered and read to the recipient. Gratitude Journaling has also been shown to increase life satisfaction, particularly if done regularly over time, with in depth and specific elaboration on what you appreciate about somebody or something, and dwelling on what life would be like without it/them. So here's my gratitude letter to clay.
Dear Clay,
It's Chai. I've known you for over 2 years now, and you have become a regular part of my life. I don't think I've taken time to tell you all the ways my life has gotten better since we've met, so here goes.
I owe my mental health, and thus my ability to continue to support students and families, to you. Obviously, you have motivated me to better honor the boundary between my work and leisure time, but your ability to help me find equilibrium goes beyond time management. Working in schools and with families requires a lot of social interaction, which can be rewarding, but is also takes a lot of mental energy given my hearing loss. You, on the other hand, allow me to enjoy my own company and nothing else. You allow me to get lost in the music while I wedge to the rhythm of a song, daydream while I paint on another coat of glaze, and focus on my breathing and my sense of touch as I pull those walls up steadily on a piece at the pottery wheel. You ground me to the present moment with all that sensory input, so that I am not regretful of things in the past or anxious of things in the future.
Working in schools and with families can also be a long and elusive process at times, because learning skills, building self-esteem, and forging relationships takes time, and are impacted by so many uncontrollable factors. So, on the days when I question my ability to help those in need, you offer me the solace of immediacy. In Erik Erikson's psychosocial developmental theory, young children are tasked with developing a sense of independence, and control over their world (Erikson, 1958, 1963), the outcome of which is achieving Autonomy vs Shame and Doubt. Kneading you in my hands, I'm once again a toddler with a piece of Playdoh, amazed and proud to discover that I can smooth, dent, and flatten you at will and make a bowl, a vase or a sculpture where there was none before. In fact, do you know that there's research showing how, by making me use my hands creatively, you actually change my brain chemistry and reduce my anxiety? You know how they say, "you can't pour from any empty cup". If I use physical labor to shape you into cups, bowls and other vessels, you refill my cup of patience and energy to do the emotional labor that is my work outside the studio.
Clay, I also want to thank you for the wisdom you share with me at each stage of making, and the poetic metaphors you give me to understand myself and the world around me. As I wedge you at the table and think about all the things you could become, I am reminded of my own and my students' malleability and neuroplasticity, and that we have the potential to grow and change as well. As I shape you at the wheel or with my hands, I am alert to your needs - Are you off-center and wobbly? Are you chafing my hands and in need of rehydration? In spending my time with you, I get to check in on myself as well, and see what needs I need to tend to before I stretch myself too thin and lose my strength and plasticity. When it comes time to trim the vessel that you've become, I trace your contours, inside and out. Does your outer shell echo the form within? What can be shed to lighten your load? Have I coaxed out the best shape I can from you? Do I want you to be polished to a shine, or do I want to retain some of your natural roughness? As I ask you these questions as the wheel whirls round and round, you ask me the same questions.
Then comes my favorite part, decorating your surface, applique, slip decoration, sgraffito, carving, handles, painting on underglaze, raku, so many possibilities if only I can grasp the right timing. There is a time for everything, you tell me over and over again, when my handles crack, or my blade strains to slice through you, or when a raku glaze comes out completely different than I'd imagined. Nothing can be rushed, slow and steady is the key, in shaping clay, in shaping minds, in forging relationships, and forming attachments. You cannot force, you must persuade, a ceramist told me once, and I realized that the same way he spoke about clay, I speak about people.
At last you get fired, first bisqued and then glazed. And every time, while I wait impatiently for you to come out of the kiln, I marvel over the miracle of taking earth, air, fire and water to transform a soft substance into a sturdy, durable vessel that might well last centuries and be dug up by our descendants to peek into the past. I get pretty cocky, imagining humans (or even aliens!) in 2999 A.D. fascinated by my ceramic slowfeeder or ashtray, or debating about the possible uses of my sculptural jewelry tree. When you finally come out from the kiln, it's like meeting a friend at the airport after a few years abroad - it takes a moment to recognize you. Sometimes, you pop my bubble by coming out with glaze that has run or turned an unexpected color, or have the audacity to crack, like you are grinning impishly at my frustrated face. Even in the last stages of making, you want to teach me a lesson. Lessons about accepting things the way they are and findings ways to appreciate imperfections (I've written a whole separate post on it!), lessons about not becoming attached to objects or our expectations, lessons about taking the time and care to let things slow-dry, or compress that bottom, so that cracks don't appear. And most importantly, lessons about failure and trying again.
I know I said that you let me enjoy sweet sweet solitude at the end of a day meeting everybody's needs but my own. But at the end of this letter, I come full circle and give thanks for the people you have given me. People that I would not have crossed paths with outside of the studio. You introduced me to all genders of actors, designers, real estate agents, doctors, nurses, bakers, scientists, acupuncturists, photographers, grandmothers, aunts and uncles, even pups (multiple, oh boy!). As an adult, it's become hard to make friends because I do not have natural opportunities of sharing the same space with the same people day by day. But ever since you've come into my life, it's been like recess at school all over again, different people coming together to play and laugh and learn, or just be alone together.
Thank you, clay, for the many ways you have shaped me.
See you very soon at the studio:)
Sincerely,
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