Vulnerable Vases

For years I have been amazed that people watch television. I don’t know where they find the time. I must have an overabundance of interests and ambitions, because I have been unable to organize my life well enough to have time for them all, and I’m not ready to abandon my impossible dreams. I certainly can’t find time to watch, on tv, someone else live their virtual life. Thus, most of the things I have projected and begun, are seriously neglected. Julie Morgenstern’s Four D method of dealing with the overwhelming has been helpful, but I don’t want to delete, I have already delayed so much that I am continually finding the forgotten, decayed, and disintegrated. I do delegate more and still more, yet in the overall picture, I delegate only a small portion of my life. My life is mine. I don’t want to delegate it to someone else. The fourth D, I’ve made my peace with. I have lowered my expectations and diminished my visions to fit reality. Almost. With this introduction, now I get specific. A year or two ago, my yard, I was told, reminded everyone of Sanford and Son (I used to watch a little TV). I was gathering material and preparing ground for a total remake of my conventional lawn into a Native Plant Landscape. I know where I am headed with it, and am making real progress in the front yard. But to some of my neighbors, I suppose it still looks like Jed Clamped and all his kin have moved into this nice neighborhood. The backyard, however, looks more like Pa Kettle’s place. This evening as I was locking gates and shutting my little flock of banties into their coop, the thought struck me: “What if I were to drop dead before I get it all uncluttered, landscaped, and planted? Would the family attempt to restore social order, or would they throw up their hands and hire someone to come in, haul it all off, level the ground, and sod it afresh with St. Augustine grass and socially correct shrubbery?” I realized that it would be completely unfair for me to die, leaving it all in this condition for them to deal with. And, although I am in excellent health, I am at an age where human bodies fall apart unexpectedly. It is happening to more and more of my friends. I am aware I am not exempt. I will not be the exception. In 1975 I took up pottery, traditional pottery, hand-thrown on the potter’s wheel, fired in a flaming kiln. I enjoyed every aspect of it, from digging and mixing my own clay, my own glazes, forming it on the wheel, firing it long hours in the kiln, then, after admiring some and throwing out my disappointments, I sold a little and gave away 99% of the best I made. I’ve often regretted I didn’t keep more, but I am glad it is in the hands of people who can enjoy it. I’ve kept and enjoyed a vase that I made in 1976. With recent renovation in my retreat, I set it on a shelf on the back porch. Apart from breakage, pottery has an incredible life expectancy: at least thousands of years. Apart from breakage, yes, but that has always been the fate of most pottery. Pottery is brittle; it is fragile. With my eyes on the inexcusable chaos of the back yard and thoughts of the unfairness of a sudden death on my part, I opened the back door to come in for the night. As I opened the door, I bumped something that was mislocated–like almost everything else in that area–and heard things begin falling. I turned and looked down. The thirty-one-year-old vase lay in shattered disarray. That easily, that suddenly and unexpectedly, it was gone. Immediately I became even more keenly aware of the fragility of human life. It could happen to me. I try to live by Naomi Shihab Nye’s advice: Walk around feeling like a leaf Know you could tumble any second Then decide what to do with your time I made pottery for only about ten years before it was diminished in my schedule and delayed until I now keep thinking I will just delete that joyous element of my world. The pot tonight was one of the last I made with my own hands and thought. I understand that Paul of Tarsus, responding to challenges from a dysfunctional church in Corinth, was talking about something different when he said, “we have this treasure in earthen vessels,” but his words also apply to the precious treasure of human life. Life is another treasure in earthen vessels. Some of us already are cracked pots, but we all will go the way my thirty-one-year-old vase did this evening. Evening is coming; for some of us it is already dusk. Know you could tumble like a leaf any second, then consider whether you have time for that addictive electronic, brain-numbing, time-stealing tube over there in front of the couch.