Learning patience at the potter's wheel
Six months of clay, collapse and the slow pleasure of making one good bowl.
The wheel does not care how busy you are. Centre the clay badly and it tells you at once, spinning a wobble into every wall you try to pull.
For the first six weeks I made nothing I kept. My teacher, a quiet man who had thrown pots for thirty years, would press a thumb into my failures and put them back in the slop bucket without a word.
