The Past

The kiln is almost loaded. Taking a break and walking through the garden with my camera. It's been a cool summer so far, but the fruits and vegetables are flourishing. I think the wet spring made them happy.
The kiln is firing now. Hoping for a good one. It's always a bit nerve-wracking.

Pottery has been around for thousands and thousands of years and I see what has survived as messages from the past. Museums can show us these remnants of antique civilizations simply because clay tends to last. Fired clay is durable and doesn't naturally disintegrate easily, and neither rusts, burns, nor melts, generally, and it doesn't tear, like paper or canvas, or cloth - so we can tell a lot about a civilization by looking at its pottery. We see the Greeks cavorting on their gorgeous amphorae as if they were living still. Little clay Venus statues of pregnant women from the European continent tell us something about their belief systems. Were they fertility figures? Were women thought to be goddesses in the Stone Age because they magically gave birth? Hundreds and hundreds of these little clay statues of women have been found. Natives of the Americas created clay pots of consummate beauty without a wheel and fired them in pits filled with dried manure, and some of these elegant pots have lasted until today....Of course, permanence is just an illusion, you may say, but, in spite of that, I feel a real connection between the potters from ancient cultures and myself. There is a line from them to me. I wonder what we might have had in common. They too felt the cool clay in their hands. They knew the moist smell of this malleable material. They could make a mark that had meaning on the surface of a pot. Creating sufficient heat to vitrify the clay was one of the problems these makers had to deal with. Just as today.
Shards containing the ancient finger marks of the long-dead humans who made them can make me shiver. What were they thinking about as they were creating? Could they too have asked themselves, why do humans make war?