Earthenware cermaics, wheel throwing soup bowls, the rhythm of the wheel; one of the first things I did when I moved to Lethbridge was look for a pottery studio I could join. I found the Oldman River Potters Guild in the basement of the Bowman Arts Centre, an ancient brick building across the street from the library.
Southern Alberta is nationally known for its ceramic heritage. Medalta clay, producing old style crock pots and mugs, table settings and stone jars, formed from the clay silt banks of the South Saskaschewan river flowing through Medicine Hat, made up over seventy five percent of the tableware in Canada until the nineteen-seventies.
There's something incredibly grounding about wheel-work: the muddy clay and and the upward gravity you produce with coaxing crooked fingers and pressure in flat-angles along the palm of your hand. The centering of the body, elbows to thighs, knees rigid, shoulders steady, neck long, chin tucked. The symmetry of form, the raising of walls, cylinder to sphere
Then to serve a meal, a bowl of spicy gingered-cardamom soup, or summer blueberry-almond steel cut oats; or that palm-warmth in a cup of tea, bergamont earl grey, or clear sea greenish, or lemon and to savor the whole circular experience of the vessel, body-to-body-to-hand-to-mouth-to-belly-to-bowl -- well, yes: