Originally from January, 2017
I just spent an hour working on a post and now it’s gone. Darn WordPress. I wrote about working with clay at the Seabrook retreat. I wrote about Martha Halvorsen and her bird’s nest made of play dough, circa 1980-something at the old Presbyterian church of my childhood. I wrote about the Audition Song from La La Land, of being a dreamer and how dreamers need to be somewhat messy, or at least not afraid of making a mess.
I wrote of rolling clay in my hand to form a ball and of pressing the ball flat like dough into my own bird’s nest — that’s what my hands do with clay. Except in Mrs. Carson’s third grade classroom where my fingers formed the grey-greenish-blue clay into faux sticky tack for a pretend classroom.
I wasn’t finished. I smashed the bird and the nest and started again, forming something new but I didn’t know what. Seconds remained of the exercise. What was I to do? I always have a plan, even for clay. But the nest wouldn’t do. I needed a new dream to dream and to form a new bridge to walk across, unfamiliar yet familiar all the same. My fingers created a place to land, a place to launch. In the final seconds, clay that was once a bird and its nest became a book and the book means to write. A book, memorialized in clay and by fire, or at least by oven heat.
The process of forming clay, and not knowing what the clay was supposed to resemble, taught me just as much as the final product. The end game was prophetic but the process itself says more: It says to roll up my sleeves, get my hands dirty and not worry about what my writing is going to be. God will tell where I’m headed as words take form. But I needn’t worry now, my job is to write.
