letting go

big day yesterday: sold the pottery wheel, kiln & related stuff. i kept a few tools i'll take to ithaca. i amuse myself often these days, watching my choices and reactions, some of which are quite ridiculous.

i took my first pottery class at age 35 fifteen years ago, at the urging of my (still) good friend, janet. over the next few years, we went through the death throes of doomed marriages together, and the pottery was therapy.

but it was more than that. until that pottery class, i'd come to terms with the fact that i was completely left-brained, and had no artistic side. that was ok -- i was good at various things and that was enough.

discovering pottery was like those dreams where you find rooms in your house you didn't know were there. i was hooked. and speaking of dreams, it was in a dream that i first told someone "i'm a potter."

over the next few years, i taught pottery classes, worked as a potter, had a studio at home, had pieces in great galleries and sold a few. i tried to find the right balance between all this fabulous creative time which pulls me and the things that push -- this drive to use my intellect and to affect both individual lives and the overall systems we all operate in.

now i'm faced with the reality that i need to be highly portable for the next few years. i'll be crazy busy and living in a tiny place. i'll likely spend summers and possibly a semester elsewhere. i can't keep this stuff.

so this is a big thing, this selling off of equipment, because it's an active acknowledgment that pottery's rightful place is not the center of my life. and an active trusting that there will be chances to play in the mud, even if i let go. that i am still who i am, even without all this stuff.

cornell

i'm in binghamton at the airport, heading back to nc. pretty exhausted.

here are some thoughts on cornell law, edited from an email i just sent to meg:

i really love the law school. compared to cardozo, all the other schools which accepted me were better for me in certain ways but not others, or were better but not enough better to justify the cost, or whatever. so cardozo remained my top choice until cornell said yes last week.

cornell has it all for me: good program, good students, the ivy tickets which may actually help in launching me, and people here who are actually doing capital defense work in all phases. this means that i can learn on actual cases but also make the human connections that will be so good once i'm out and working. in addition to the death penalty focus, there is a professor who is focused on the issue of race in capital work, and another who is doing empirical studies which might make use of the math way back there in my background. cornell's loan repayment assistance program will make it doable, even though i'll officially take on an impossible debt.

eric is being unbelievably supportive. he is so excited that i have the option of going to a great school that i have fallen in love with. we're not sure what this means for him -- whether he can make it work in ithaca or will need to spend some/all of his time in the city, with us both doing some back&forth. too soon to know yet.

there are lots of little bonus things: a pottery studio just across the way, a moosewood lunch cafe right inside anabel taylor, the chance to spend a semester or year elsewhere, which may help with the eric calculations -- they say lots of folks go to nyu, which was another school with which i fell in love. of course most surely go for the corporate stuff, but i don't see why i couldn't go for the death penalty stuff. of course, ithaca feels a lot like the parts of asheville i love, all crunchy-granola.

it's a relief to be allowed to put this process down, and get to work on the next phase!

there are still a few good schools which haven't responded, but i think i've sent my regrets to all but one of the schools which admitted me. that one deserves a thoughtful letter.

three pics

the cable is here, so i'm testing it . . . here's the sunroom on a rainy day, not the best shot but it catches this moody room's feel yesterday:



and two pottery pics from yesterday

this one is for the dinker, who understands about the sheer joy of greens:


work in progress, the top of an oil lamp, still at the greenware stage, my first attempt to use underglaze -- we'll see how it turns out!



this is a double-walled bowl (15" long) i made last year, but just glazed recently -- the black glaze shows all this blue/gray/green in sunlight