To fire a wood kiln one has to be resilient. It is not a matter of simply doing it over and over again. We have to lean towards the dreams that are held in our mind’s eye, to scratch and scratch at the itch of the embryonic ideas held in our imaginations. It’s through the tenacity of tree-like growth that we blend our dreams with our hands, the kiln, and clay.
We amass 400-500 raw pots and then spend several days placing them in the kiln. As each pot gets placed we are imagining how it might look after it shrinks and is licked by the flame and marked by the kiln’s atmosphere. Some pots are placed to block the the path of the flame so that it will turn or linger. We like to remember what we did in prior firings, trying to build on experience rather than insanely making the same mistake over and over again yet hoping for a new result.
Today as we chose the work for the back of the kiln and counted plates for the floor I had my moments of doubt. Do we have enough pots? Do we have too many pots. I have learned these are the questions I ask every time I fire.
OPTIMISM
More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs — all this resinous, unretractable earth.
–Jane Hirshfield, in Each Happiness Ringed by Lions: Selected Poems