That One Time I Experimented with Pot – Wyoming blogger and photographer

I enrolled in a ceramics class through our local community college this spring.  Not actual pot.  I’ve never been that kind of creative type.  The only thing I’ve ever smoked was some tortilla chips under my broiler one time.

But I have loved art since I was a kid.  The mornings when Mrs. Strickland would roll her green art cart into our room loaded with paints or clay or paper and scissors was one of my favorite parts of the week.  It didn’t matter that what I made wasn’t all that great.  It was just fun.  Fun to build.  Fun to experiment.  It was fun even when my project was lopsided and ugly and looked more like a sink drain catcher than an ashtray.

(Yeah, I made an ashtray in art class in elementary school.  Let that sink in for a minute.)

But like so many other things in life creating just for the joy of creating was replaced with creating for perfection.  For a grade.  For competition.  In junior high art classes, I stopped enjoying just drawing or sculpting and started worrying about the score I’d receive and how those scores would affect my GPA.  Where’s the joy in that?

Being a mom, though, gives me an excuse to be creative and do art just for fun.  I love to drag out the watercolors with Wyokiddo and paint or build Play-doh animals if only to squash them and start over.  It’s as if our hands and heart are connected and building something with them, however fleeting, mainlines joy to the soul.

Photography has been one of those creative outlets.  But since I’ve made it my business, I’ve found myself wanting to try something else.  So I signed up for a community education ceramics class.  I was inspired in part by listening to the audiobook “Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear,” a book by Elizabeth Gilbert.

I loved the book so much I bought the hard-copy so I could read it again and underline my favorite passages.  This was one.

“Do whatever brings you to life, then. Follow your own fascinations, obsessions, and compulsions. Trust them. Create whatever causes a revolution in your heart.”

I loved the art room the minute I first crossed the threshold.  The earthy smell of clay, the completed and half-finished projects others so lovingly brought to life.  Bright colors and happy folks just doin’ their thing.  What a place to be.

Last night was my first time throwing on the wheel.  It was nerve-wracking and exhilarating all at once.  I mean could I honestly use this motorized, spinning metal wheel to coax beauty and shape and delicacy into this lump of earth?  I struck out on my first two attempts.  My final try wasn’t exactly a home run, but it was mine and it was beautiful.  Listing right, slightly.  But beautiful.

As I drove home, I felt my spirits lift.  There was a lightness in my chest, a grin in my voice.  Because I stopped worrying about getting it right or being perfect and just did something that caused a revolution in my heart.  That’s the kind of pot I could get addicted to.

I’ve told a few people about taking the ceramics class and so many of them have said: “Oh, I’ve always wanted to try that.”

I think Elizabeth Gilbert has it right.  Each of us has these amazing jewels buried inside of us.  We want to be creative, to throw a pot or write a blog or paint a knock-off Monet.  It’s one reason why pop-up studios and paint-and-sip classes are so popular.  We are inherently blessed with the need to build and create.

Why don’t we create more, then?  What is holding us back?  Time, fear, ridicule, perfectionism?  For me it was a little of all of the above, plus some self-doubt thrown in for good measure.  I’m a writer turned photographer.  And now I think I can become a potter, too?  Really?

But I told that voice in my head to shut up and signed up for the class anyway.  I gave myself permission to do it, just because I wanted to.  If for no other reason than that.  And that my friends is a good enough reason.

So give yourself permission to try new things.  To fail.  To be so horribly awful at something that it’s positively laughable.  We need to spend less time worrying about the outcomes and more time enjoying the process.  Because that is what living a creative life is about…construction, not completion.

I’ll leave you with another quote from Gilbert, one that I copied down and saved for perpetuity because it might have been exactly what I needed to hear.

“You don’t need anyone’s permission to live a creative life. If you’re looking for permission — THERE, I just gave it. Now go make something.”

Teresa