Good Morning Hank, it's Tuesday.
After all the excitement this weekend I feel like we could use
a little peace and quiet, so let’s just make some pottery today.
(birds tweeting in the background)
Those birds are some good paid actors. By the way, please don’t correct
my pottery technique. I’m not trying to be good at pottery,
I’m trying to distract myself from all the,
uh– gestures broadly.
Ok, so I’m centering the clay here. I’m making these little closed forms
I call secret keepers. The idea is that you whisper something
that’s difficult or painful or traumatic or whatever into the little holes
at the bottom of the secret keeper and then the secret kind of lives
inside the form inside of instead of having to
live inside your brain.
I want them to be a wonky, so absolutely centering the clay
on the wheel is not like, mission critical.
But, with pottery, as with brains, centering is helpful.
So, as of recording this, the 16th Annual Project for Awesome
has raised just over three million dollars for charity.
You can still donate at
projectforwesome.com/donate until the end of the day.
I don’t know what to say about the P4A
except that every year it is awesome in the classical sense of the word.
Overwhelming, intimidating, thrilling, and above all, beautiful.
All weekend long I kept thinking how lucky we are, Hank,
to still be able to do this.
To still feel the warmth and the light of this community.
It’s just incredible.
So now that I’ve got the clay centered enough for my party.
I just start to press down in the middle and it sort of naturally forms sides.
Now you’re starting to work with a cylinder.
I’m going to very inefficiently
and inelegantly pull the sides of the cylinder up now so that
the secret keeper can have some height to it.
The thing about making pottery on a wheel, is that the wheel actually
does almost all of the work.
Wheels, by the way,
were not initially invented for transport or whatever.
They were invented for pottery.
And when I throw pots like this one,
I often feel as if I’m doing something ancient,
but in fact, it’s not that ancient.
Like, both eating bread and drinking beer are older than wheels,
and indeed older than wheel-thrown pottery.
I think my favorite part of the project for awesome this year
was at the very end when our families were on the stream,
and everybody was celebrating together, and the chat got together
and wrote we’re here because we’re here,
because we’re here, because we're here.
It was just so lovely, a kind of written global chorus.
P4A is just, it’s just the best, Hank.
It reminds me that hope is the correct response to consciousness.
Now, there’s a word for what I’m doing right now with the clay,
but I kind of forget what it is. Basically, I’m trying to coax the walls
of my vessel toward each other using very light pressure from
my palms and my fingers.
If before I was bringing the clay up, now I’m trying to bring it in.
And this is the place where it can and often does all fall apart.
I have to be everything my highly distracted
internet based brain does not want me to be.
Attentive, steady, patient.
It’s something close to meditation.
Once I’ve got the form closed at last,
then it’s happy, happy fun time. I’m gonna play with a tool here.
Mostly just for giggles, but also because I do enjoy a
spiral and this lets me carve little spirals into the clay.
Sometimes I end up wanting to keep them,
other times I end up mostly smoothing them over.
But even when you cant see the spiral, you can sometimes feel it
in your hand when you hold the secret keeper.
And I like that some things
that cannot be seen are nonetheless felt.
And then once it’s done I take it off the wheel and bring it over to dry
with its friends.
I used to think art had to be great to be worthwhile,
now I only think it only has to be, to be worthwhile.
Hank, thanks for sixteen amazing P4A’s
I’ll see you on Friday.