Photo by Sarah MacDonald
In pottery class, the instructor told us that clay works (or doesn’t) along with your feelings. She said this as she centred a piece on the wheel—gripping the damp, smooth ball and coning it up and pressing it down with her top hand angled until it spun evenly—and that if you’re not into it, the clay won’t be into it either. The clay will not work with you if you’re not working with it. There’s something important about physically feeling a material’s resistance to your pushes and presses; refusing to go along with your wishes, collapsing if you’re trying too hard and forcing it into something.
A few classes ago, feeling sullen, suspecting it was the full moon’s energy or my own depletion, I wrecked my first perfect bowl that I made on the wheel. I loved it. I put weeks of trial and error into it, feeling satisfied that I could make such a thing. I pulled a taut string underneath to cut the clay from the wheel to lift it off and it immediately ripped on the side, a gap forming between base and wall. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, tried not to cry, and crumpled up the clay, setting it on a table to dry. Once clay has been worked as much as that bunch had, it can’t really be used the same way as before. I know later it’ll make handles for mugs.
The clay will not work with you if you’re not working with it.
I missed class last week, my next chance at redemption on the wheel, because, after a much needed acupuncture appointment, my body, for the first time in a long time, refused the pushes and presses of life. I was a clump of flesh, balled up, set upon my own table (my bed.) I tried to nap when I returned home from the hour-long public transit trek from old neighbourhood to new neighbourhood but was coiled, unfocused. I could feel my brow furrowing as I tried to sleep. I awoke from what felt like 20 minutes of sleep more tired than when I got into bed. When I got up to get water, I shuffled to the couch instead, grimacing. Dan asked me what was wrong, had something like this ever happened before, and worried the way he does when it seems I may be succumbing to the pressures I place on myself. I said no, and that I suspected it was a deep fatigue released from needles placed and pulsing down my spine, hips, and glutes to calm both my nervous system and relieve some pressure from my day-to-day sore hips.
I’ve long heard how hips carry the most emotional weight but wasn’t sure I ever believed it. When I took a test to see if I should be on antidepressants, my doctor said it was almost invalid because, while I noted I had lots of anxiety, I didn’t measure high as a need to have them dealt with. I had said to her I simply go on with my life when I’m anxious, which, of course she said, was very bad. She then prescribed me a sister drug of Lexapro, nearly three years ago, something I started tapering off of on Sunday. My hips are a lot like that. Pressurized. I guess I’ve carried trauma pretty much everywhere all the time. I don’t like thinking of my hips, this connecting point between top and bottom halves of my body, as boxes for my stress and trauma but I suppose that’s what they are.
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The sun was out all weekend. How divine. We’re fickle creatures who, even though we know the seasons shift and weather conditions change, cling to brief reminders of warmth like it’s the only time we’ll ever hold it. My sister is a famous hater of winter. For months, she curls up like a little snake on a rock, wishing for warmth, coming alive when the sun heats her face. Torontonians are famously thirsty for summer. We pretend like nothing else matters except for Toronto summers. From May to as far into September as we can get, we’re bike-bound, park-bound, tall-cans-on-the-road-bound, short-shorts-wearers, ready for sizzling cement and street festivals and wearing night on our skin like these are the moments we’ll come alive fully as ourselves. We’re nostalgic. Maybe it’s for youth or a moment when anything and everything felt possible, who knows. It’s a feeling that’s quenched, sustained, and immediate every year like clockwork. Every sunny winter day brings us back to what’s possible.
I walked the streets of an old neighbourhood with a friend as the sun warmed us and we stopped in a flower shop to marvel at some blooms. Buckets of soft ranunculus, peonies, blue roses, spray roses of every colour, freesias, parrot tulips, hydrangeas, and more roses upon roses for Valentine’s Day. I don’t work with flowers as much as I used to because our new neighbourhood lacks the floral access we had in the west end. I’ve taken up pottery in the meantime but crave the sensory bits of flowers like damp stems, silky petals. I miss Victoria’s Flowers. I miss walking in on Tuesdays, a fresh delivery of new blooms in the fridge, orchids lining the window—counting down the days and weeks until the spring garden centre arrived. Still, I left Avenue Road with white frilly parrot tulips and blush coloured ranunculus, feeling a little more like the self that was unburdened by much of anything—using my hands and mind the way I liked to. This was my winter reminder of what was possible, even as the sky dims to grey once more.
I find the winter months to be a lot like working with clay. You can’t force it to become something it’s not going to be. January serves as a reminder of newness, even though it’s really a time of dormancy. The sheen of January’s earliest days are gone, the brightness of a brand new year, giving way to the grim realities of winter, thunderstorms while snow falls from the sky, blue Mondays, shovelling, remaining in one place and seeing the days go by on and on. I wanted more from this January but I think I want more from most anything. It’s not exactly yearning. Perhaps it’s more like impatience. Impatience is the best friend of pressure; hastily working toward something for reasons that don’t make sense, only that you want it to be done.
Clay asks you to slow down. It asks you to be patient. It reminds you when you’re going too hard or not hard enough; when speed matters to get to a certain point, and why slowing down once you get there is best for the rest of the journey. Even stretching, moving, bellying out, pulling up walls and shaping the piece have specific pressure points and speeds. I find I’ve only just begun to pull up walls of pieces the way the clay has asked of me. It has taken me weeks but I can push my two fingers on the inside with more pressure than the two on the outside, slowly, gently, watching the clay rise until I remove my fingers at the top. The clay doesn’t notice at all and that’s the point.
~
I worked on something all of January for a submission and who knows what the future will be because of it. It’s no secret that I’m working on a book of memoir essays. The more I speak about it, the realer this project becomes. I’m taking my therapist’s advice here to use my voice and reinforce that speaking things into existence won’t mean they don’t happen for me (a belief I’ve long held.)
I don’t have an agent. I can’t even fathom pitching it to anyone. Yet, every morning I arrive at this computer and work through some of the most difficult moments in my life; bringing these memories, these pressures, to a digital page, working them into something beautiful, something of a release for me. Working with my actual hands rather than relying on my fingertips to create something has shifted how I view writing. Clay becomes a bowl into a utility piece I put my food in and there: a sensation of accomplishment I actually made it with my own hands. Writing is slightly less sensory—unless you’re published in a magazine or newspaper, then it’s something else but still not exactly the same. But a bowl I shaped with my two sore hands, wrapping my fingers and pressing my palms into its nothing to make something is a marvel. This book I’m making into something, to release from my body, will arrive when it needs to. I wonder what happens if the pressure to form or be something changes if thought of like clay. Wrap your hands around the idea, gently cone it, centre it, and inch by inch soften the pressure and speed and see where it takes you. This winter will be what it needs to be. And this spring, this year. What do we miss if we don’t slow down?
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Beautiful words and experiences today...with clay, pressure--soft and hard. Everything! Loved it. Thank you for making me weep at the beauty of clay, flowers and summer sun.