Meg's Musings

Disappointed Creative Reverie

Hello Darlings!
I have returned from my 635 mile hidey-hole. The smells of summer are everywhere and I’m almost COMPLETELY done with school crap. It’s funny. Through dating David I’ve noticed more and more of the natural world. I’ve seen the leaves turn color, fall off, snow fall, melt, fall, melt, turn grey, melt, soak in, grass and leaves creep forth again and finally fully leaf out into green glory. I kinda like the smells of driving. On the way home I pass both a Jim Beam factory (smells like popcorn with fake butter), a sugar factory(smells like cake baking), various dead animals leak out the sticky smell of death—one part disgusting yet somewhat familiar in a not entirely unpleasant way—icky smelling cart exhaust, choking truck emissions and, if I’m especially lucky and God smiles at me through sunshine, newly mown grass for miles on end.

I am very sad this week. Whole-heartedly disappointed. I was bumped from my pottery course. I was very very much looking forward to working in clay.

I like building with wood. I like making a skeleton; exact cuts that stay where they’re supposed to, a frame forming and taking shape solidly, removing flex with a wailing hammer and eventually having my imaginings become solid bits of set.

I like working in paper and paint, the stray stroke inspiring brilliance, the colors bleeding together for beauty.

Wire is satisfying but pokey. I don’t really like it.

I like creating with words, either typed with neat precision or written with pleasing curves and angles to express ideas and anger and beauty and joy and faith and hope and frustration and all the things that matter and things that don’t and ME!

I don’t trust fabric. It requires too much foresight and forbearance. It betrays my visions by moving from the size and shape I’ve cut it or refusing to curve when I demand it must. And no matter what, it insists on being essentially what it started as without apology even if I wish it was half a shade lighter at the end.

I like working in people, even though they are annoying and tend to stray from where I’ve put them or learn their lines, or sit quietly while waiting for use or not wander off. Like wood, I occasionally want to hit them with hammers. But I don’t. It wouldn’t be Christ-like.

But I like clay.

I like everything about clay. I like the way it’s hard when I take hold of it and then it gets formable with a bit of pounding and elbow grease. I like the way it gets dry but revives with a touch of slip or water. I like that it forms in my hands with no other tool or responds to any number of tools. I like that it hardens and bakes and can be made colorful simply for form or for function. I like clay.

I think it is no mistake that the metaphor is that He is the potter and I am the clay. It’s a gentle but firm forming. There’s not the violence of cutting and pounding as in wood. Not the pokiness of wire. Not the reforming without changing the pattern. Not the explicit complexity of words. Not the irreparable errors of paint. It’s silent work with voluminous results. It’s set to a tune that soothes and awakens me.

I like clay.

I am very sad that this is not my time.

posted by Me @ 19:03