summer solstice #10 2010

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A year ago now I was just finishing up the wet work phase for the wood kiln. We had an afternoon thunderstorm so I quit to go to the house and watch the rain and clouds blow through. I drew a group of bottles on a window sill to focus my attention on the next batch of small vases for the back of the kiln some of which are pictured below.
 
This morning I have finished making things for the glaze kiln and after a session of weeding and picking flowers, Zoe returned from a run and headed to the pond. With the dog in tow I grabbed my towel and followed her inspiration. The pond was refreshingly cool and floating with eyes at water level I looked at the trees and sky like a water particle or a thought slipping from past to present swims, stroking on to future possible swims.

10-bottles.jpg"Maybe it is simply because the body is about 70 percent water, but swimming in a river confers a sense of intimacy with the natural world that isn't easy to come by. And if you feel you own a little piece of this river, there is also something in the way the real estate of the water slips through your hands that persuades you that the river owns a bit of you as well. It is a fluid exchange. Intimacy with the river, like other kinds of intimacy, is laced with ambiguity, with questions of ownership elusive and variable. And it becomes an easy thing to imagine yourself a particle in the river's continuity, so easy, in fact, that you begin to see things the way the river might see them. And you see, then, how that continuity can be reassuring. You somehow go through life to a certain point always thinking that even if you can't exactly start over, at least you can fix things or change them and that all the missteps and wrong directions can be corrected and that it is never too late. Later you may find yourself believing that is no longer true. I looked up the river and down it. Its flow was certain, its direction unchangeable, but still it could take on the day's nuances of light, the vagaries of the shifting tide." Just Beneath the Surface, Akiko Busch

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