Simple pot

Let’s think with you how to make your own pot so that you can put beautiful flowers and enjoy it; or cook delicious food and feed yourself, your loved ones; or keep something very important in it, fill it with something very significant for yourself, which will preserve and make your body beautiful. Let’s try to trace the logic of the metaphor of creating a pot and the logic of solving our real life problems.
So, what is the very metaphysics of how a pot is created, and how does this relate to the mechanisms of the human psyche? To get clay, you need to raise a layer of earth, soil, to which we are accustomed, which is easily accessible, remove it. And only then, after some time, you can get the clay to create a pot. It is difficult, just like starting something new is difficult: leaving the familiar and comfortable requires more stress.
Next you need to clean, mix the clay well. This preparatory stage is like an invisible work that is far from the visible result. Many people stop at this in real life, because it is very difficult to keep the final result in your imagination.
The next step is to mold the shape you want, but there is always a BUT. How difficult it is, repeating over and over again, to make mistakes and not get the way you want – and here many also give up. And a person who is in love with the process, making mistakes over and over again, goes further. And one day he creates what he wants, like a great master, a creator.
Then you need to bring the pot to hardening at a huge temperature: firing with fire is part of the process. During the firing process, the clay gets rid of almost all moisture, so the product becomes much lighter. In addition, clay elements are sintered and turned into a single ceramic ingot, which is resistant to deformation and moisture penetration. Hence the need for roasting. Only then do you get a very dense, reliable, strong pot that can withstand temperature, moisture, and cold. So it is in life, removing the excess, and when we are burned by criticism and misunderstanding, we become whole and strong.
I think that many of us now have a direct association of how this is connected with our mental life, mental activity. In the same way, in order to create in ourselves some new form, a new structure, a new I, a new type of activity, we have to remove the familiar, that which comes easy to us, and raise a heavy layer. Often almost unbearable. To knead it for a long, long time to no avail – just like we go through some path, going to the goal, sometimes wandering in fog or darkness. Then collect from this chaos the form that you want (as our thoughts create some form of a new Self, when we make a choice, we recognize what we want). And then we harden it, as if we are being tested, but can you stand it ?!
The creation of a pot is very connected with how we live our existential situation: we fight, endure, knead chaos, wait, let something soft, still completely unreliable, dry and harden. And only when all stages are completed, we can get a result, a resource from our own activities.
And it seems that in this metaphor of the process there is a lot of deep understanding of the very wisdom and philosophy of life. Realizing that we are creators, and creation will never be easy. Because even to make an ordinary pot requires a lot of steps, effort and desire. Stages to the image that we can get as a result.
Therefore, the pot, of course, is a simple object, and it will not go anywhere.
But we often have to do it ourselves.
In a metaphorical sense, of course.
Victoria Nazarevich, 2019 ©

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