Hobbies and Healing Hands

Doing shit just because. Yellow Brick Road.

Credit: Ethel Moore

This is what goes on in my mind while I’m throwing at the pottery studio. Listen while you read <3

I’m gonna talk about pottery and doing shit we actually love again this week because, well, it’s all I care about right now and possibly forever.

As someone with heavy earth sign placements in my birth chart, it should come as no shock that I used to view hobbies as little more than work you don’t get paid for. As it turns out, that’s exactly what hobbies are - but in a good way.

Adults (not a label I identify with, but ok) are often too incapacitated by the grief of growing up to realize the best parts of being young can be carried with them in the practice of dedicated fun. We’re debilitated by the loss of time to obligation and the 40(+) hour work week, of losing spirit to a day-to-day entirely devoid of creativity and play. It feels almost silly, at nearly 28 years old, to have just recently unlocked the restorative power of being a hobbyist, but here we are!

Of course, we already know we can’t pour into anything or anyone with an empty cup, and the antithesis of living with a full cup is chasing burnout. There are two things, often combined in a perfect cocktail of misery, that close the distance between us and burnout. The first is a lack of rest. The second, which many people neglect because they can barely even imagine penciling in rest, is a lack of active rest. Hobbies.

In physical therapy and bodybuilding, active rest days - during which you neither participate in any strenuous exercise nor remain completely sedentary - are crucial for muscle repair and strengthening. Active rest in terms of the body seems to serve the same role and purpose that hobbies do for emotional, mental, and spiritual repair. Rest can bring us to equilibrium and restore energy lost, but the creative source we get from hobbies expand our capacity to give and carry energy in all of its forms. Hobbies deepen our well.

As someone who often feels like a jumbled up mess of feelings and thoughts, I first sought hobbies that brought me back into my body. I wanted to work with my hands and my heart - that’s all.

I wanted to be near people, but not with people. Though, I will say that the benefits of hobbies that are unlike baking or gardening and require teams or community like sports are just as valuable. I wanted to feel like I was at the top of a mountain, with the vantage point of perspective and the wisdom of the climb to get up there. I wanted liminality. To be neither completely still, nor moving in any particular direction for any particular purpose other than because I fucking wanted to. Still moving, still growing, still spinning gold thread to weave the fabric of my life together.

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A lover of icebreakers, my best friend often asks the group at a party or small get-together, “In ancient times, when craftsmanship was still a thing, what would your profession be?”

When first presented with the question and without more than a few seconds thought, I answered: “A potter.”

Then I realized pottery was very much still a thing that people do and was entirely accessible to me. So I enrolled in my first class shortly after that and have been studying ceramics for the last 6 months.

In those few short months, I’ve come to know craftsmanship intimately. Sitting at a throwing wheel can be as defeating as you let it, wrestling with revolving clay to see who will stand tall and in full form in the end - desperately hoping the answer is both of you.

The most essential stage, the stage that demands the most of your time, patience and grit, is called centering. To center, you have to keep your elbows anchored in the fold of your belly and leg and press the clay mound with your palms, forcing the wet ball to cone in between your hands and go up, up, up. Then you use equal force and speed to push the cone down and so on until the wet clay ball stops wobbling. My favorite part about this process is that when you get really good - in order to get really good - you have to close your eyes and let the connection between your hands and your work do the talking.

What the person is doing at the wheel next to you won’t make your piece centered. What you think you have to do won’t make your piece centered. What your hands are guided to do when they touch the clay will make your piece centered. You have to be all the way in.

Adults seldom have opportunity to connect with each other outside of work, town gossip, or happenstance. Everyone in my pottery class is a doll, but we don’t often speak to one another. Amy, who I met a few months before we started our semester at a one-off experimental class and brought her 16 year old son, shares my tendency toward fixation and sometimes we exchange techniques we found on YouTube between sessions. I asked her why her son didn’t join us for class one time, and she simply responded: “I don’t recommend it.”

When I asked her to clarify what she didn’t recommend, she said, “Procreation.”

Period, Amy.

From the first class on, it was clear that everyone had chosen pottery to find liminality. To be with themselves. Once we’re all seated at our wheels, it is almost an unspoken understanding that we have each found our place at the top of our own mountains and there’s no need to shout each other down. I like that.

We sometimes experience liminality between life cycles or right before we take a huge leap of faith.

This kind of liminality, between nothing and novice, found in hobbies like pottery is one that requires you to detach from the center of others and your own expectations in order to find the center of your work. The dedicated practice of being all the way in, not one step behind or ahead of the process, stripped from the ego telling you to stop while you’re ahead, that the work is not worth completing unless it’s perfect, that polish needs to come first. These ideas are constructs of the mind, but when we allow ourselves to be swept up in the hobby, in the fun work, in the clay, in the food, in the paint, in the dribble, we are in the heart and the hand. Right where magic can find us. You guys know that’s my favorite place to be.

I find myself largely detached from anything I create in the studio. Something I’ve rarely felt outside of obligation and true labor. If a piece cracks in the drying process, if the glaze gets finnicky on application, if a piece doesn’t make it in the kiln, there will always be more clay and time. And the wisdom of knowing the repetition of that process is more valuable to me than the piece itself, so it is worth doing.

There is another woman in my class named Kate. She has beautiful silver hair, warm energy, and the gift of diligence. She delights in focusing on the same kind of clay body for an entire class. Some days she will make the same jug, same height, same form over and over. Some days it’s the same bowl, same bulbous shape over and over. This is the best way to make technique second nature, though I prefer to try new forms until I find something I like.

I always assumed Kate was quite serious about her practice, that maybe pottery was less of a hobby and more of another glorified form of productivity. Then recently, I asked her what she will do with all of that work. To my surprise she said she would get rid of most of it. That nothing she was creating was so precious to covet. She just enjoyed not having to think. She loves the trance of doing the same over and over.

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I’ve been pulling the Eight of Pentacles in my daily tarot reads a lot. The traditional interpretation of the Eight of Pentacles is one of mastery, determination, diligence and hard work. This makes sense because I am working on some longterm projects like nobody’s business. But I also have been dedicating so much of myself to my hobby which is allowing me to pour into said projects. My absolute obsession with the mastery of something that is not my job has shed a new light on the mysteries included in this card and its significance beyond productivity. We are sometimes mastering something built to last far longer than money - ourselves and our creative source.

True Heart Intuitive Deck by Rachel True

The spiral in the background of this card suggests that the person working is in a state of trance. The center of anyone or anything - where bustling cities, dinging inboxes, and Google calendar invites await - is far, far away as the cloaked figure sits with their head directly in the making of a ceramic disk. In their solitude, the artist is not susceptible to mimicry of another’s skill. They’re not susceptible to comparison, or the distraction of crunched time.

Cloaked. The cloak and the figure without a face or distinguishable characteristics also implies that the creative is lost in the rhythm of creation. Like my classmate Kate. The natural pulse and second nature of dipping the brush into acrylic, sweeping it across the disk back and forth, and starting over again with the next. This is the liminality. This is the place where we go up to the mountain to be alone with our abundant source. To allow our hands to channel what our brains won’t allow. Our ego, our mask is dissolved, and we can tap into the imagination which is omnipresent and infinite.

Speaking of infinity, the number 8 itself is infinity upright. The number 8 is the number of self.

In Women Who Run With The Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estes says that creativity "emanates from something that rises, rolls, surges, and spills rather than from something that just stands there hoping that we might, however circuitously, find our way to it.” And so, our creativity cannot be lost, as something integral to our existence (perhaps even our existence itself); but it can be neglected. We exploit our creativity in overworking and overproducing. We limit our creativity with stagnation and excessive attachment. We honor our creativity through hobbies and dedicated fun.

The number 8, represented by a faceless character in this tarot card, connects our relationship to hobbies to the act of mastering self. The practice of building energy stores, getting lost in the rhythm of the creative process and dedication to our desires, talents, and unlocked potential. Turning dormant energy into something that will last and can be shared by all who love and pour into us. In hobbies, we are simply honing energy that benefits whatever is touched by it. Whatever or whoever is touched by us.

You’ll notice in the card that the artist does not look at the pieces they’ve hung up. They do not concern themselves with the two they have yet to start. This is the mastery of presence and focus on the power being channeled. This is how one guarantees their mark on work is raw, distinct, and lasting.

The final act of creating a piece before sending it to be fired is the signature. Mine is my initials, which I share with my mom. The K looks just like my mom’s signature, which is not a coincidence because I modeled my John Hancock after hers in order to forge paperwork for school trips if I forgot to ask, and I never turned back. This signature acts as a seal, a certificate of authenticity. Whomever holds it will have been handling a piece of me and my ever-expanding capacity to be shared.