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What making pottery in third grade taught me.
About the mind.
When I was in the third grade, I enjoyed making pottery. There was a small shed on the grounds where the ‘school potter’ ran a class. His tools were rudimentary — a large truck tire mounted on a base, with a wooden turntable in the center. There was no electricity or a motor to turn the wheel. Instead, using a long stick that I placed into a circular hole on the tire, I manually spun the wheel until it was fast enough to shape a pot by squeezing, kneading, and lifting wet clay. Once the clay dried, I baked my pots in an outdoor brick kiln next to the pottery shed. The following day I painted the pots with natural pigments. There was limited space on my desk to store all the pots I made each week. I broke the old ones and returned the remnants to the earth to make room for more. There was something profoundly comforting in digging my fingers into soft wet clay that carried an earthy scent resembling fresh rain falling on dry soil. It made me feel like I was one with the earth. I don’t remember missing a single class.
A child’s mind is like a lump of wet clay, while the conditioned mind of adults, rigid in their ways, is like clay that is burnt and hardened. A gentle touch of a finger on soft clay spinning on a wheel creates different shapes depending on where and how much force is applied. But once a lump of clay…
