"A Seed-Sower": M.C. Richards

It took me half my life to come to believe that I was OK even if I did love experience in a loose and undiscriminating way and did not know for sure the difference between good and bad.  My struggles to accept my nature were the struggles of centering.  I found myself at odds with the propaganda of the times.  One is supposed to be either an artist or a homemaker, by one popular superstition.  Either a teacher or a poet, by a theory which says that poetry must not sermonize.  Either a craftsman or an intellectual, by a snobbism which claims either hand or head as the true seat of power.  One is supposed to concentrate and not spread oneself too thin, as the jargon goes.  And this is a jargon spoken by a cultural leadership from which it takes time to win one's freedom, if one is not lucky enough to have been born free.  Finally, I hit upon an image: a seed-sower.  Not to worry about which seeds sprout.  But to give them as my gift in good faith.

--Mary Caroline Richards,
Centering: In Pottery, In Poetry, and the Person, 1964.


(Thank you, JMcC, for first pointing me toward Richards' book.)