Inspirations
I’ve been re-inspired by Mary Caroline Richards’ book Centering in pottery, poetry, and the person (1962/1989). In it, she writes with such fluidly poetic phrasing that I’m transported into her creative world.
She wrote “the imagery of centering is archetypal. To feel the whole in every part” (p. 4). This inspires me because it resonates—I have felt, and can bring into my imaginal recall, how it feels to center a ball of clay. I remember the first time I felt it “click,” the sensation of how the clay feels when it (and I along with it) shifts into a centered position on a spinning wheel, and how it felt within me to have created it. Though it took more than a minute to master, it is now a part of me. The process of centering clay can take me into a state wholly focused on this one task but at the same time, aligned within myself, attuning all my parts to a common goal. It is a complex, whole-body sensory attunement. In literal terms, it transforms malleable material into something of a spinning potential—centering clay is about getting the material ready to become its next form. But what goes on inside the maker is like a unique language, a sensory dialog, that speaks in subtle terms.
As Richards put it: “it is a language far more interesting than the spoken vocabulary which tries to describe it, for it is spoken not by the tongue and lips but by the whole body, by the whole person, speaking and listening . . . it is the total person who hears. Sometimes the skin seems to be the best listener, as it prickles and thrills, say to a sound or a silence; or the fantasy, the imagination: how it bursts into inner pictures as it listens and then responds by pressing its language, its forms, into the listening clay. To be open to what we hear, to be open in what we say” (p. 9).
Whether or not we identify as creative or think of ourselves as artists, perhaps we all might connect with the experience of what art can do. To Richards, “art creates a bridge between being and embodiment . . . to perpetuate our supersensory awareness” (p. 42-43). To me, art is the language of creativity. And it can inspire, heal, challenge, express, expand, enliven, and so much more: “the artists, the poet, the maker, the true scientist, works from inspiration” (Richards, 1962/1989, p. 94). Art can happen through clay, through architecture, music and dance, but even through a carefully crafted spreadsheet. This universal language of inspiration is archetypal and yet so individual.
Where do you currently find or express inspiration? How do you experience this in embodied terms?
Richards, M. C. (1989). Centering in pottery, poetry, and the person (2nd ed.). Wesleyan University Press. (Original work published 1962)