"When you do something, you should burn yourself completely, like a good bonfire, leaving no trace of yourself" Shunryu Suzuki →

There is a t'ai qi principle of 70% which is about turning up again tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that, until it's done.  It is fantastically easy to get caught up in catastrophisation: creating a crises that I have to save the day by solving: it is addictive stuff, high highs and black-dog pits.  And the more caught up in it I get the the duller the next hit.  The duller the hit the greater the effort... etc etc.  Spiral time.  70% demands attention, connection and completion, and breathing.  The first rude joke my father told me has stayed with me, and now still surprises me with its dodgy zen quality:  On a hillside, an old bull and a young bull look down at a herd of cows.  The young bull, eyes crossed with excitement, "Let's run down and fuck one!" The old bull replies, "Let's walk down and fuck 'em all".  I was some sort of early teen, we were on a walk, on a hillside as it happens, in Dorset, I'm sure I laughed not really getting it. He had not said "fuck" in that man-to-man way, to me before.  I didn't mind not getting it - I had been included in a man thing.  So, it stuck.  My first encounter with 70%.  

At school I was never a sprinter,  I thought I was fat, and maybe I was a bit.  Second row prop and  I was a good swimmer, and for a brief moment (probably one gala) swam for the county.  Competitiveness never really got me, I realise now I mind too much about loosing.  Becoming a tv director was counter-intuitive,  I'm not happily competitive and my brain freezes over when I am rushed.  Early days and stunt men would completely banjax me with, "no, no, it's like this: take the swing in the wide, get the emotion in the mid, and take the hit on the reverse angle... guv"  i knew I had to respond in kind, and quickly, so would completely bollocks it by putting myself in a ludicrously complicated situation that I didn't have time to shoot my way out of.  One of the main joys of 70% is having time to think and to talk, and do it well.

Yesterday we had a truly satisfying bonfire.  Started well, it burnt everything we put on it.  It's still going now, outside in the dark, 36 hours later.  And this morning Andrew and Larry came to help me repair the track to Jo's house, which is deeply pot-holed.  I had ordered 2 tons of scalpings, enough for the whole winter, I thought.  The first half ton went into one pot-hole, and I realised we were going to run out very quickly.  After about an hour we were finished, several holes filled, many more as deep as ever.  Over coffee and Eccles cakes I apologised for not having ordered more scalpings. Andrew just said "70%!" - we had filled the ones we filled pretty well.  We had learnt a lot about the bottomlessness of pot-holes.  We were still speaking to each other, and able to plan what happened next.  And each of us had time to do a next thing before lunch.  Repairing a road may not be as glamorous as making an episode of Casualty, but I will come back tomorrow, or whenever the next few tons get delivered, and continue to enjoy doing it.  It's not a chore.  And I had time to finish other work I had started yesterday, including bringing the bonfire back to life.  The reminders of my father, and of reading Shunryu Suzuki talking about a good bonfire, arose in the 30 unused %.

Watching the sunset while discussing fear, Trump and pot-holes with the smoking heap (I have always had a very intimate relationship with bonfires, again down to my dad, a pyromaniac of epic vision) I realised that in two days I had achieved more than I had expected.  70% creating more from less.j

"As soon as you see something, you already start to intellectualise it.  As soon as you intellectualise something, it is no longer what you saw" Shunryu Suzuki

Storytelling pots →

Looking at the photographs of the Richard Batterham exhibition recently ended at Contemporary Applied Arts and hearing about it, what strikes me is the vision of the work and the space he creates in it for continuing stories.  There are bowls made in 1962 close by the same bowl made fifty years later.  The similarities and profound differences are the measure of a story still being told.  And that is not the only story, I have a lidded jar of his that I keep coffee in.  It is beautiful, very useful and will outlive me.  It has Satish Kumar's BUD within it - beautiful, useful and durable.  It holds my coffee and the story of my relationship with it, really well.  

Made objects have their own story, of the conceiving in the maker's mind, the meeting of intention and action when the object is made, thrown, turned, glazed and fired, and the object that reveals itself when the kiln is opened.  The predictability of the process in no way diminishes tension and the pleasure (or not) of that moment.  Any object has a story, its own and the tale we invest it with when we pick it up.  A pebble on a beach, a book of matches, a railway ticket.  

Batterham's retrospective was made of pieces he had held back, the ones he kept because they spoke to him.  Maybe there were pieces he didn't put up for sale because to start with he wanted time to discover how he felt about it.  There is an intimacy in the relationship with what you make.  Going to friend's house to see a piece of my work in their washing up rack is a huge pleasure, and I remember the piece and sometimes its story.  My past work is clumsy and awkward, but even so reminds me that I was imagining this object at that moment.  For me it holds a particular story.  For my friend it holds another.  And stories are our engagement with each other and ourselves, our intimacy.

Recently I have been putting together a showreel of work that I have done .  Its purpose is to show potential employers what I can do, it's an opportunity to showboat.  Each piece has a story of how and why it turned out the way it did, for you watching, they are glimpses of stories that maybe you have seen, or are intrigued by (or not).  But they are not frozen for either of us, both in terms of how I feel towards them now, or in how you look at the reel as a single piece.  For me also it's creating an object which I hope will affect the future;  I need to work, to carry on with that work.  As I work on it so it becomes more rounded, more skilled, I get better at manipulating the editing app.  There are lots of technical hold ups and reversals, each time I get sent back by error or lack of skill, something is revealed.  

And in the garden of the pottery a kiln is finally taking shape that has gone through a similar process of reversal and over thinking.  Both the showreel and the kiln are means towards an end, and both have taken on a story of intention and imagination.  What will the story be this time next year? Richer and surprising.

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For Larry : Other words for teaching...

Teaching.

Other ways to look at how that word works. Sharing experience, handing on a practice, a process.  The making of anything demands a discipline & a practice.  Transforming imagination into action, making the imagined exist.  Creating a place where the transformation is possible, without needing to know exactly what the outcome will be.

Taking a photo, making a pot.  Making an episode of Casualty.  Process, equipment & technicality need to be at the service of the idea.  How to liberate thinking, to use the kit to make the thing.  Not allowing the stuff dictate the outcome.

Liberation, vision & voice.  Being here & being seen.

Speaking with Amy today, discussing teaching, she described how she feels it works for her. And it's not performing to please the students (children for her).  It's about working together, and discovering the events together that allow them enjoy it.  Collaborating towards laughter.  

Learning happens in an environment where responsibilities are discovered and shared.  A teacher becomes someone who frees up the material.  Knowledge and experience creating an environment where thinking is possible, where its consequences are unknown and discoverable.  The experience and trust that I need to create that place, communicates itself to those people I am working with.

Coach / coaching / coached : coach potato

Collaboration : consorting with the enemy or creating a place to grow : planting seeds, gardening,

Sowing the whirlwind / reaping the storm

Searching for grains of truth.  Investigation / enquiry.  

Listening

Apples - autumn arriving

Autumn.  Here already.  Boxes of apples, damson bloom, evenings stretch out dark for so much longer.  The equinox passed,  more night than day until... the next equinox.  Colours change, shift, fall, carpet.  Seeing through trees happens more often.  Silhouettes at evening are sparser, harsher dark shaped branches, inner structures reveal after so many months hidden.  Transition to the fire colours.  The way the light recedes and leaves is different.  Brief moments of pale stubble fields radiating upwards, before shadows gather and flatten everything.  Rook caw and owl screech.  Even a fox screaming on Addleymoor adds darkness and erotic charge to the unrolling dark.

Retreating inside, there is more time to... read, write blogs, watch dvd's, catch up with... sleep.  The dark outside is pushing the windows.  Underwater darkness.  I love this time of year.  There's no trouble finding an excuse to light a fire.  The fields and common outside quietly continue to be full of hidden exuberance.  

The car is full of apples.  In the cool of morning it will smell like the cellar of my grandma's greenhouse, softly damp with the memory of gently stored apples at any time of year.  Leaving the topmost ones glowing in the dying sun.  Can't reach them anyway, and leave some for the birds.

So, autumn has come.  Welcome