Learning patience at the potter's wheel
Two hundred bowls, one teacher and the hardest thing I have ever tried to learn with my hands.
I signed up for the pottery class because I wanted to make one good bowl. I thought it would take a weekend. It took four months, two hundred and eleven failed bowls and one conversation that changed how I think about almost everything.
The first lesson is centring
Every piece on a potter's wheel starts with centring: pressing a lump of wet clay until it spins perfectly true in the middle of the wheel. If it is even slightly off, everything you build on it will wobble, lean and eventually collapse. It sounds simple. It is the hardest thing I have ever tried to learn with my hands.
My teacher, Inês, is seventy-one and has thrown pots in the same studio in Lisbon for forty years. She watched me wrestle with the clay for three weeks before she said anything. "You are trying to make it centred," she said. "You cannot make it. You can only stop making it uncentred."
