M. C. with students (Creativity:Clay, Color, and Word)
As I mentioned yeseterday, M. C. Richards is one of my heroes. She was ahead of her time, teaching wholeness through her art, her poetry and her presence. " M. C. taught by witness and inspiration....She gave us seeds that we planted in our souls. Sometimes these seeds had momentary lives, but often, even after decades of gestation, at the right time, they germinated...fertilized gems." This quote is from Paulus Berensohn, an artist who worked with her.
I first encountered her story in the The Fire Within, (a DVD about her life and work) during a Painting Experience retreat at Esalen. She simply captured my heart with her humor, her wisdom, and her self actualizing approach to art. She lived her art--- danced with it, questioned it, kissed it, sensed into it, appreciated it and more than anything, saw it as a process of creation and expression, not as an end product.
M.C. was a poet, potter, teacher and modern day mystic. She had a childlike sense of wonder, through which her wisdom simply flowed. She referred to this state as “centering.” "Within us lives a merciful being," she observes, "who helps us to our feet however many times we fall" (p. 8). "Wisdom is not the product of mental effort," she tells us. Rather, it is a state of "total being, in which capacities for knowledge and for love, for survival and for death, for imagination, inspiration, intuition, for all the fabulous functioning of this human being who we are, come into a center with their forces, come into an experience of meaning that can voice itself as wise action" (p. 15). From Centering in Pottery, Poetry, and the Person by Mary Caroline Richards ( Wesleyan University Press 1989 )
Here are several of her poems.
Potter
This flat plate. This ladle and bowl.
Clay whirled on a wheel, raised slowly to the table.
Straight and curved, our primal gestures
take and give---speak out about
the way we stand and breathe.
Every leaf is saucer for the bread.
Every falling drop prepares its cup.
Always we are eating and drinking earth's body,
Making her dishes.
Potters like sun and stars
perform their art---
Endowed with myth,
they make the meal holy.
MC Richards
Shining Hands
This hand flickers at my lips,
this hand falls to its knees and bows,
two hands drum time out of silence.
Like flowers they open and close.
Soul flows down my arm, blood-warmth
in my fingers.
O hand at my breast, you teach love.
You guide our spoons into our mouths.
You free an angel from marbled rock.
O heart, our of your deep dark
our hands carry light into this world.
MC Richards
