HOLD ON LET GO: Urns for Living and the Art of Trusting Time

Ceramics came into my life the way the bird divinations had a year earlier — suddenly, mysteriously, as a coping mechanism for the confusions and cataclysms of living. I was reeling from a shattering collision with one of life’s most banal and brutal truths — that broken people break people — and I needed to make, to do the work of unbreaking, in order to feel whole again; I needed something to anchor me to the ongoingness of being alive, to the plasticity of being necessary for turning trauma into self-transcendence.

A daily creative practice is a consecration of the indestructible in us and a technology for trusting time. Overcome by the need to make something breakable that nonetheless holds, I started taking weekly pottery lessons with the most wonderful teacher. Every day I sat at the wheel on my own for hours, centering and looking for my center. The skin on the edge of my palms grew raw. My nails cracked, fell off. I started dreaming in clay.

One morning, I awoke possessed by the urge to make small symbolic vessels for burying what no longer serves that needs to be left behind (beliefs, projections, habits of being), but also for safekeeping what is most worth holding on to, nurturing, fighting for — in a relationship, in a vocation, in the soul.

I called them urns for living.

Somehow, they didn’t feel different from my primary writing practice — all creative work springs from the same source: to comprehend our human experience, to give shape to our suffering and our joy, to find our way to each other and back to ourselves in this wilderness we live in beneath the canopy of one hundred trillion synapses capable of sorrow and of song.

I made an urn a day. I used everything from century-old typesetter’s letters to children’s stamp sets to impress on each of them the words HOLD ON LET GO in a closed loop along the perimeter — a reminder that our necessary losses anneal who we are, that what we keep of our shatterings composes the mosaic of our lives, that the process is ever ongoing.

Each urn is a different shape and color. Some have a ghostly great blue heron — the closest thing I have to a spirit animal — lurking in the glaze. Some are emblazoned with TRUST TIME. Some cracked, some broke, most had a mind of their own about glazing orthogonal to the vector of my intent. All are numbered sequentially with the day count. All are imperfect, uneven, and entirely their own thing — like the people I love the most.

I decided to make them for forty-one days, then start giving them away on my forty-first birthday (which is today) to people who have made my life more livable — some to pillars of my private world, and the rest to you: Support from readers makes my life literally livable by putting food on my table and books on my shelves, yes, but also contributes to what makes it worth living — without a constellation of kindred spirits, without the sense that one is not alone in one’s values and enthusiasms, there is only the maddening soliloquy of our infinite loneliness in conversation with itself.

To account for the merciful fact that I am a human and not a factory — there are only 41 urns — and to avoid the rude privilege-mongering of auctions, I will let the impartial hand of chance distribute them: To enter the raffle, make a donation by August 7 in any amount that is right for you, but end it with the decimal .41, whether it is $1.41 or $1,000.41. (This will help me separate the urn raffle from the regular donations.) Let us favor morality over mathematics — no manipulation of probability by making multiple entries: just one per person, so we may remember that we are all equals as children of chance.

As to the outcome of my experiment in trusting time: Sometime around day 30, I realized that beneath the surface of my awareness something tectonic had begun shifting in me, rearranging my emotional landscape. My surrender to the process — of making and of grief, that eternal equation of holding on to oneself while letting go of one’s loss — had changed me, changed the room in my heart filled with clay into a chamber full of song.

Suddenly, in rushed the world with all its wonder, everything I had stopped seeing or ceased being able to imagine — fireflies, lichen, love.

In letting go, I had discovered the thing most worth holding on to: the knowledge that the imagination of life is always greater than that of the living.

donating = loving

For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.

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