With maturity comes surprise and in most cases humility. I feel a lot more confident in certain things and a lot less in other things, mostly my snap judgments or the parameters of “the way things are and will forever be” because it is simply not attainable to know how things will forever be, I don’t even know FOR SURE HOW anything will go. I've been working with clay and failing quite often in my personal life and in my work with clay. Things break and fumble and take time. I guess the surprise and the certainty is with time things take form, for better or for worst. Now with all this said and all this mentioned, I’ve severely in my life underestimate the weight of my collaboration with time. This is what I’ve learned through the medium of clay, you can’t skip steps! no shortcuts! and sometimes you gotta learn and you can’t avoid destruction. When scoring, you have to smooth over every crack because clay remembers, you have to mend separation and you have to return the clay to itself but differently. The poetry of the earth lies in ceramics, and it teaches. I don’t know if life is the clay or I am in the clay in this metaphor. I mold life as much as it molds me, as I change states from mendable to leather, to stiff- I remember my failures, rejections, and traumas. It lies in how well I smoothed the tears and joined the parts if I will allow myself to break. The most humbling thing about ceramics is- even with all the precautions shit still hits the floor. I was taking a bowl I threw on the wheel outside to stiffen it up so I could carve it, I tripped the bowl flopped down and flattened like a pancake, and really there was nothing I could do but scrap it up off the concrete and kneed it into something I could work with. I call that acceptance.