My ten minutes of drawing today focused upon a dracaena plant in the window. It is a plant that I took from my father's loft after he died so the image of it in south-facing winter light takes me swimming back through the rivers of Christmases we spent in New York City on Sullivan Street. So then I looked back through my photos to make a drawing of the inflatable Santa my Dad set out in the loft for the last decade of his life. Filled with air it stood almost touching the ten foot high ceiling.
In my photograph one of his house plants leans crooked in the background by the window with a few of my pots on the window sill. I disliked that noisy Santa but it makes me laugh when I now think back on it. Zoë told me that today she made a list of things she had done, places she had traveled and people she met over this last decade. I look at the pots on my father's window sill and remember making them and the insights they held in my progression as a potter. There is a river of variations on cups I have made and we have filled. Here's to thinking about all the ones I hope to fill in the next decade.
"Nobody can discover the world for anybody else. It is only after we have discovered it for ourselves that it becomes a common ground and a common bond, and we cease to be alone."
--Wendell Berry
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