Centering

"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.)

M.C. Richards: Being Passionate, Defined

          But of course we have to be passionate.  That is to say, when we are, we must be able to be.  We must be able to let the intensity -- the Dionysian rapture and disorder and the celebration of chaos, of potentiality, the experience of surrender -- we must be able to let it live in our bodies, in our hands, through our hands into the materials we work with.  I sense this: that we must be steady enough in ourselves, to be open and to let the winds of life blow through us, to be our breath, our inspiration; to breathe with them, mobile and soft in the limberness of our bodies, in our agility, our ability, as it were, to dance, and yet to stand upright, to be intact, to be persons.  We come to know ourselves, and others, through the images we create in such moods.  These images are disclosures of ourselves to ourselves.  They are life-revelations.  If we can stay 'on center' and look with clear-seeing eyes and compassionate hearts at what we have done, we may advance in self-knowledge and in knowledge of our materials and of the world in its larger concerns.


--M.C. Richards, Centering: In Pottery, Poetry, and the Person