Pottery and Words

Pottery and Words

Knead, caress, sculpt, glaze; actions that create pottery, a simple bowl filled with hollow space. Time determines how the hollowness fills itself.

While sitting at my desk, the small pottery bowl soon fills--a paper clip, a handful of coins, three copies of the same business card, a stick of gum and fingernail file. Over time, the emptiness becomes a whole with purpose.

Some days, the pottery creates excitement when a young person finds a lost earring or the lip-gloss forgotten. Other days, the pottery bowl is upside down, contents emptied as the mother searches her house for that one last cigarette. In time, the pottery bowl refilled and replaced on the desk, where all is well.

Little spaces in life are challenging yet comforting. Like the pottery bowl, kneaded, formed, sculpted and fired, I am a bowl filled with hollowness and emptiness. Tossed and turned upside down, I set out to fill that emptiness. I discovered writing. I discovered my talent. I began to fill the hollow space. Filling space is challenging.

While facing life’s challenges for many years, I wrote very little of substance; all the time, yearning to release characters I meet on my journey, to put words to paper that describes the shining sun through treetops while cool air remains beneath the tree limbs, or to show how small fish can nibble the bubble of a leg hair.

I write on with the hope that one day my readers will smile at the characters or events that I put on paper, and that my hand-formed pottery self-fills with words of wisdom and humor.