you are the ones I
must have needed
the ones who led me
in spite of all
that was said about you
you placed my footsteps
on the only way.-W.S. Merwin, “To the Mistakes”
For many new potters, one of the hardest things to accept is not only how long it takes to go from a ball of clay to a finished pot, but also just how many things can go awry along the way. Pull a vase too thin, and it’ll collapse. Dry it too rapidly, and it’ll crack. Fire it in a kiln before it’s wholly dried, and it may well explode.
Novice potters learn the hard way that a million tiny factors—some within our control, some well beyond—dictate whether a new project will zig or zag, whether what results is the best thing you’ve ever made or a worthless pile of rubble.
I had intimate cause to reflect upon this reality recently, and it initially kind of broke my heart.
Weeks earlier, I had spent an afternoon at the studio of a ceramicist I very much admire, learning to make a particular style of cup. That day, the potter dedicated hours to patiently teaching me a favorite pinching technique, then sent me home with the start of four very sweet little sake cups, along with instructions for storing them until I could complete them on my own. Those half-finished cups spent the next couple of days lovingly swaddled in a refrigerated yogurt container (who knew?) before I could bring them to the clay studio and complete them. After I was mostly satisfied with their forms, I draped the cups in plastic and left them to gradually dry. While I waited, I spent no small amount of time shopping for glazes, trying to find one that would break in just the right way over the gentle curves and contours of the cups. I bisque fired them and painstakingly sanded them until the porcelain looked as if it had been burnished.
And then I totally fucked up.
It was late on a Saturday afternoon. I had somewhere I needed to be that evening, and I was already behind schedule at the studio. I should have just come back another day. But I was impatient to complete the cups and bring them home, so I dipped them in the purchased glaze and carried them to the firing shelf.
In the short time I’ve been making pottery, I have come to believe that glazing is, if not an entirely dark art, then at least a form of witchcraft. Even under the best of circumstances, glaze is unpredictable: what you think will be blue comes out amber. What you are certain is smooth bubbles and drips in the heat of the kiln.
One of the most common rookie mistakes is over applying glaze, which will cause it to run down the sides of a pot, pooling at its base and ultimately supergluing that pot to the bottom of the kiln.
Knowing this, I’d at least been careful enough to wipe the bottoms of each cup. And as I took them back to the firing shelf, I even checked in with a fellow potter to make sure I’d left enough of the bottom exposed. She took one look at the cups and shook her head, asking if I’d dipped them.
I told her I did.
“Oh, no.” she said. “You have to brush on that glaze. Otherwise, it’s too thick.”
In my gut, I knew she was right. But because I was already tetchy and running late, I put the cups on the shelf anyway. As I drove away, I even rationalized the decision, telling myself that the thicker glaze would helpfully hide all the imperfect gestures left by my amateur hands and lack of technique.
A week later, we fired the kiln. I was at the studio the night it had finally cooled down enough to unload, and so at least the task of trying to pry the ruined cups from the kiln floor fell to me. Nevertheless, I felt devastated. I’d squandered the time and clay gifted by the professional potter. And I’d knowingly destroyed the otherwise lovely artifacts of our time together.
After an hour or so of effort, I managed to grind off the worst of the puddled glaze and bits of kiln bottom using a Dremel. That time sitting on the floor of the kiln room gave me ample opportunity to alternate between waves of self-recrimination and self-pity.
However, and even after all that time spent Dremeling, the bottoms of the cups were still hopelessly jagged and uneven.
Back at home, I spent a lot of time thinking about what my friend Cate Dicherry calls, The Fine Art of Fucking Up. Initially, of course, I was mostly focused on what a brilliant job I’d made making a mess of things. But then, just like the protagonist in Cate’s very smart (and funny) novel, I also began to see those opportunities when the act of fucking up is what actually allows for art to happen.
One of my favorite anecdotes from the world of jazz illustrates this perfectly. As Herbie Hancock tells it, he once had the opportunity to accompany Miles Davis in a particularly high-stakes performance. During one of Davis’s more complicated solos, Hancock played a chord he knew was terribly wrong.
“I thought I had just destroyed everything and reduced that great night to rubble,” he would later say.
Instead, Hancock watched as Miles Davis took a quick breath and immediately began riffing on the chord, sending the solo into an unexpectedly rich and sonorous new direction.
“It sounded like magic,” says Hancock.
I’ll let him tell the rest of the story:
It took me years to figure out what actually happened. And here’s what happened: I judged what I had played. Miles didn’t. Miles just accepted it as something new. And he did what any jazz musician should always try to do, and that is to make anything that happens into something of value.
That’s also a very Buddhist idea. The spiritual practice has no provisions—no language even—for mistakes. Instead, practitioners believe that what many of us consider failures are actually our greatest moments of opportunity and discovery.
In her book Fail, Fail Again, Fail Better: Wise Advice for Leaning into the Unknown, the great Pema Chödrön talks frankly about her own moments of perceived failure. The hardest of these came on the cusp of her second divorce. Having watched not one but two marriages end in catastrophic fashion, she found herself at one of the lowest moments of her life, laid out by feelings of guilt and shame, of being both a quitter and someone who was fundamentally unlovable.
It was in that moment of utter heartbreak, though, that Chödrön found the impetus to become not only a Buddhist nun, but (I would argue) one of the most insightful and revered spiritual teachers of our age.
Chödrön is quick to caution against following her exact path (especially, she warns, if you are someone who understandably desires a continued sexual identity). Instead, her real point here is akin to Hancock’s: it doesn’t really matter what perceived failure or mistake get us there or even where, exactly, they lead us. Instead, it’s what we do to embrace the opportunities these moments provide.
Mistakes and failures, by their very nature, tend to leave us feeling heartbroken. But it’s in that breaking that we are finally cracked wide open. Those cracks, to paraphrase another great contemporary sage, are where the light gets in. And we all benefit when it does.
“Mistakes,” writes Chödrön, “are portals to creativity, to learning something new, to growth and inner transformation.”
The trick, she insists, is a willingness to sit with the feelings of rawness and vulnerability that arise in these moments, to confront the fears that leave us feeling stuck. “The question,” she concludes, “is are you going to grow, or are you going to waste your precious human life by status quo-ing instead of being willing to break the sound barrier?”
I’ve never had a lot of grace where failure is concerned. Truth be told, I hate making mistakes or believing that I’ve made a mess of things. And it doesn’t take anything nearly as significant as the dissolution of a marriage to get me there: I was plenty worked up over those botched cups.
But I am also someone who has never had much patience for status-quoing. I want a life as big as any sonic boom. And that means taking the words of thinkers like Chödrön to heart, and finding space to practice the art of riffing.
In the case of the ruined sake cups, I can’t claim to have arrived at a spiritual epiphany or artistic awakening. But I did find my own little moment of creative discovery.
To salvage the cups, I needed to build them a new base, one that could both make them level and accommodate the jagged edges left by the remnant glaze. After some thought, cork seemed like the most viable solution. To further integrate it into the design of the cups (and to hide the glue and chipped glaze), I also wrapped the bottoms in hemp and copper wire.
They will win no aesthetic awards, but I’ve at least rendered them fully functional. And I’ve found a new universe of possibilities working with mixed materials. Just as valuably, the process of trying to save them was fun. It was about play for its own sake, play as an act of redemption, and that alone felt worthwhile.
Maybe most importantly, it was a reminder about the beauty that can be found in our missteps and their aftermath. Unlike just about anything else, failure has the ability to shake us into full consciousness. It’s only there, wide-eyed and humble, that we can truly see the full range of possibility. It’s there that we can tap into our boldness, to consider horizons and eventualities we’d never before considered. And it’s there, in all those previously unimaginable new spaces, that we so often find our life’s greatest joy – all because we were willing to make an art of the ample, everyday opportunities we are gifted to royally fuck up.
-Kate
Love it! Thank you, Kate!