What the Making is Making of Me ~

“Every authentic act of creation changes the creator before it changes the creation.”
—Karen Carmack
This quote came from my friend and teacher, Karen, after she taught me to shape a ceramic bowl. And ever since she said those words, I haven’t stopped thinking about how that moment has “shaped” me lately.
The last 45 days have been very creative for me. I've been writing, of course. But I've also been moving things around my home, seeing familiar spaces differently. I've worked with clay, lumber, screws, brackets, art, and photography. And every act of creativity has been an open process, with a fair amount of figuring-it-out-as-I-go.
I think the spark was ignited when I stood by my (SELF) and said out loud, “Hold on, because what unfolds next is going to be freaking extraordinary.”
At the time, I didn’t know any of these creative moments were connected.
Then I sat down with a lump of clay.
As I shaped that little bowl with my own two hands, I noticed something about myself.
I wasn't trying to make it perfect.
I pressed patterns into the clay without worrying whether they were evenly spaced. I let lines wander. I left crevices where they appeared. The bowl wasn't perfectly round or smooth, and I didn't keep working it until it was.
I just let it become what it was becoming.
There is a version of me who would have struggled with that.
She would have wanted the pattern uniform. She would have smoothed the rough places and evened the edges. She would have kept adjusting and correcting until everything looked the way she thought it should.
But sitting there with clay in my hands, I didn't feel the need to do any of that.
And it was incredibly freeing.
I don't even know how the bowl will turn out. It still has to be glazed and fired. Maybe I'll love it. Maybe I won't.
Who am I kidding? I will absolutely love it, no matter how it looks.
Because Karen's words helped me realize something: the bowl isn't the most important thing I was creating that day.
Something was changing in me.
Over the past month, I have stumbled upon all sorts of hidden creative treasures, not only in my writing, but in my home, on my deck, and in things I never would have thought of as particularly creative, like the process of making my London Fog tea.
And I think they all began with an openness.
A realization that has been slowly settling into me:
I am no longer living for someone else.
And I am no longer living solely from the parts of me that learned how to manage my survival for 56 years.
Those parts served me well. They learned to anticipate, manage, perfect, explain, accommodate, and control. They helped me create a life that felt safe.
But survival and creation ask different things of us.
Survival wants certainty.
Creation asks us to stay curious.
Survival looks for the “right way”.
Creation wonders, What if I tried this?
That is what has felt so different about this season of my life, Act III. I am giving myself permission to make things without knowing exactly what they will become.
And somewhere in the making of all of them, I am being made, too.
The bowl may come out of the kiln imperfect.
I hope it does.
And I will love it every time I see it sitting front and center on my table.
Displayed for all to see.
Peace,
J~

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