Some might call this a "work in progress", for that is what it is, but I look at this and see the creative process.
Purely semantics, I supposed, but for one thing, it's not work. To a writer or a potter or a painter or a carpenter, doing what you love, doing what you are called to do, what you do instinctively and joyfully -- even when it feels like hard, manual labour -- is not work.
Again with the semantics! But as soon as I saw this half-finished mug sitting on the wheel in Jenn Houghtaling's studio outside of Pugwash, I knew I had to take a photo.
I love moments like this, that brief period where something is what it is but not what it started as and not what it's going to become. But that moment mid-way in creation that says to the person whose hands are on the clay or the pen or the brush or the keyboard, "Now look at what you're doing!" That moment which produces a ripple of belief in oneself that propels us forward into completion.
It's a moment full of potential, a moment full of hope and peace and joy, full of possibilities and that divine sense of self that makes all the hard, manual labour and the back spasms and the headaches worthwhile.
Jenn is the subject of one of my essays in the Field Notes book so I'd asked her to create some "Field Notes" tumblers and a mug for me (because you can never have too many mugs). One of the tumblers will be included in the Field Notes gift basket I'm planning to create as the door prize at the book launch.
One of a kind and limited edition!
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