Clay Like Ripe Fruit
There's a sensuality about summer that's so heavy, so carnal, as to feel desperate in its urgency. Peaches, plums, tomatoes - their skin pulled taut, in happy danger of sudden rupture. Skin stays dew-dappled from morning though night. Leaves are a lascivious green. Sight feels slightly fogged - by heat, by too many porch drinks, by longing - so that taste, touch, sound, feel are turned up high. Thirsts of all kind feel quenchless.
In the workshop, too, the pots have been looking particularly sultry. Swollen bellies, slender necks, severe vata angles alongside soft kapha curves. One day in particular, when the air felt oppressive, the pots, still wet from the wheel, were pulsing with a corporeal appetite - like bodies too close in a sweat lodge or on the subway. Then, even simple bolts of freshly pugged clay looked like so much restless flesh longing for touch.
John outfitted his already fecund pitcher forms with overgrown, wild slip-trailing, like snaky liana set free to conquer.
Alex tended his garden with more scruples, making strong, sharp beds to tame and contain his dramatic lines.
Amanda has proven herself an impossibly fast learner, voraciously learning new forms by bringing an intense and quiet focus to her wheel.
On our days off...
We visited Alex's brother, Nick, in Idaho where Nick leads raft trips down the West Fork of the Salmon River. Alex was in trout heaven, and Nick granted him permission to drive the boat for a minute. He was a natural.
We took another trip up to Massachusetts to attend a wedding. On the way up, our pup Zuma gave us quite a scare when she almost ate herself to death (bloat!) but the day after a traumatic 24 hours in the hospital she was swimming laps in Old Frog Pond like nothing had happened at all.
We whirled down to Charleston, South Carolina for two days with our friends Jacob & Alicia where we gorged ourselves like migratory seabirds on shellfish and white wine.
We had a great visit from this L.A. woman - my mama - and her friend Leslie, who cabbage-patched to James Brown with Mark Hewitt and cooked a feast for a ragtag gang of roving potters on our porch.
And I started teaching regular yoga classes. You can read more about them here.
