M.C. Richards came to pottery from poetry and drama, and she found in the potter’s wheel a metaphor for all creative work. This excerpt opens her book on centering, a meditation on the inner work that precedes the visible act of making.

What strikes me is the sequence she implies. Before shaping comes centering. Before the clay can take form, it must be brought into balance. And this centering happens not in the material alone but in the maker. The potter’s hands transmit steadiness or wobble depending on what the potter brings to the wheel.

We live in a moment of extraordinary generative power. We can prompt and receive, iterate and refine, produce at speeds that would have astonished any previous generation. What we cannot delegate is the centering. The tool does not know what we want to make, or why, or whether it matters. Those questions reside in us, and they require the kind of stillness Richards describes. The firm, the steady, the silent.

I wonder sometimes if the harder task now is not the making but the preparing to make. Finding the quiet place from which the work emerges. Knowing what shape you are reaching for before you begin to press. The wheel can spin faster than ever. But the centering takes exactly as long as it takes.