In a piece entitled, “Impassioned Clay,” Ralph Helverson wrote, “We are clay, the dust of creation with the breath of life. ...The core of life is a tough residual element that is earthy and basic. Earth and air and fire and water—these conditions birthed us and sustain us.” He used the metaphor of “impassioned clay” to symbolize what it means to be human.
His words recall those of the book of Genesis in which humankind was created out of clay, made in a divine image. To be made in the image of a creative force is to suggest that fundamental to our being is the ability and the desire to create.
Ironically, Eden’s paradise supported a passive existence. Beyond the walls of that idyllic garden, human survival demanded continuous creativity. Such creativity involved then, as now, the making and re-making of ourselves using the clay of our lives.
Potter Marjory Zoet Bankson knows the meaning of impassioned clay. She writes, “Made of stone, water, and organic slime, clay is the elemental mixture found everywhere in the world, offspring of the world itself. ...Working with clay wakes me up, calls me back to my senses, and gives my soul a tangible expression, a language with shape and size.”
There are many marvelous stories of potters in ancient China. In one of them, a noble is riding through town and he passes a potter at work. He admires the pots the man is making; their grace and a kind of rude strength in them. He dismounts from his horse and speaks with the potter. “How are you able to form these vessels so that they possess such convincing beauty?” “Oh,” answers the potter, “you are looking at the mere outward shape. What I am forming lies within. I am interested only in what remains after the pot has been broken.” For poet and potter M.C. Richards, the moral of this story and the function of creativity were both simple and profound: “It is not the pots we are forming, but ourselves.” Each of us is a potter working with the impassioned clay of our lives.
Photo: Me behind the wheel, by Melissa Bridgman, May 30, 2005, (CC BY 2.0), https:// www.flickr. com/photos/bridgmanpottery/171543609
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