Quick now, how many weeks in a quarter of a year? How many playing cards in a suit? How many donuts in a Baker’s Dozen? Yep, thirteen and thirteen and thirteen!
And, now, how many columns in the photo above? Oooooh, twelve! Looks like, after hitting the half year mark last June in my year-long one-a-week small face jug project based on the question man-type column called “Local Talk” in the Santa Cruz entertainment rag the Good Times, I just might have gotten one done in the Third Quarter.
But, oh, what a good one! And oh, what a great lesson in the creative process! Am I bothered and beating up on myself over not working The Plan? Absolutely not. Did I earlier? Maybe, although I was so busy I don’t recall.
Basically this project is going like this:
Last January, Week One, I tremblingly cut out the column on that first crystalline Thursday, went to my studio and made a small jug. I sweetly imagined myself doing this each Thursday the entire year.
Might have done that for the first five weeks.
From February to April I wound up making jugs every 2-3 weeks, a more economical use of time! I bisque-fired the first thirteen from Quarter One and wrote a few blog postings about it.
The blog photos and the writing gave an accountability to the project like I had never experienced and I created the jugs for the Second Quarter with anticipation. It was great fun to introduce them.
So then here came the busy summer, the busier fall. I have made lots of ceramic pieces, just not my Local Talkers.
Of course, I still collect the Thursday paper and date and number each column. If I start to fuss over the backlog, I breathe and take a much longer view. How do you take care of your dreams? Gently. Lovingly. Determinedly. With humor!
Look at all that potential up there! I scan those faces, absorbing them and conceptualizing. This apparent pause is rather normal and not a cause for any flustering doubt or flapping guilt. It is a time of Gathering: ideas, columns, steam, right intention and focus. When I get back to the making, addressing each week in order, I will make one lovely face jug at a time with all my heart, just as I imagined.
I will still bisque the whole lot of them before I add the colors. I did research and test some of my color ideas over the summer: more Gathering! When I have the whole year, the full deck, the Baker’s Dozen times four, they will begin to become the body of work I intend. In the meantime, I take it bird by bird.
So that’s what’s happened in Quarter Three. That and this:
All my gentle, loving, determined, funny and irreverent wishes for the rest of the year!