On Monday mornings my routine is to take a walk by myself–no dog, no husband–to set the tone for the week. But this morning as I headed out I stopped to pick blueberries, then take photos, and wash tools in the studio, a different way of setting the week’s tone. Over the last 15 months we have had a few trees come down or need to be taken down. One of them was a white pine our daughter Zoë planted as a seedling brought home from preschool. When the top of it blew off in a big windstorm it caused major car damage. The good news is now that it’s gone more sun reaches the blueberries.
My friend tree I sawed you down but I must attend an older friend the sun
I remember after my father died when I packed up all the pots I had made that my parents had saved at their loft over the years. I was surprised to see the beginnings of forms and motifs some of which I am still trying to capture. When I think back to those early attempts at making pots it’s like being pre-literate. I didn’t have the words to describe how a pot filled space, what it’s volume was, or why it was enticing. I often wonder where did the ideas come from. In a few cases I can define a specific influence. I recollect a dinner with Robert Ellison when I was in high school. He showed my parents and I some of his George Ohr pots. My dad said “I remember the things Catherine made after I showed her Picasso’s ceramics. I can’t wait to see what she makes after seeing these twisted and inventive pots.” Today in the studio I was tired of my go-to solutions. Instead I wanted to work as if I was digging potatoes — my hands feeling in the dirt without seeing , yet finding the hard shape of the prized new potato.
“Children make up the best songs, anyway,” he [Tom Waits] says. “Better than grown-ups. Kids are always working on songs and throwing them away, like little origami things or paper airplanes. They don’t care if they lose it; they’ll just make another one.” This openness is what every artist needs. Be ready to receive the inspiration when it comes; be ready to let it go when it vanishes. He believes that if a song “really wants to be written down, it’ll stick in my head. If it wasn’t interesting enough for me to remember it, well, it can just move along and go get in someone else’s song.” “Some songs,” he has learned, “don’t want to be recorded.” You can’t wrestle with them or you’ll only scare them off more. Trying to capture them sometimes “is trying to trap birds.” Fortunately, he says, other songs come easy, like “digging potatoes out of the ground.” Others are sticky and weird, like “gum found under an old table.” Clumsy and uncooperative songs may only be useful “to cut up as bait and use ’em to catch other songs.”
I have been working on shifting my attitude towards weeding, moving it from a chore to an adventure. After listing to a podcast by Margaret Roach on A Way to Garden I have been calling it treasure hunting. I am looking for seedlings instead of just pulling out unwanted plants even if that’s what’s involved. The other morning I was happily discovering Mexican sunflowers and pineapple sage when I came across what I thought was an aggressive giant weed. When I pulled it out I was pleasantly surprised to find it was a radish gone to seed.
“My idea of gardening is to discover something wild in my wood and weed around it with the utmost care until it has a chance to grow and spread.” – Margaret Bourke-White
