Amy and I are what Peter Drucker called "knowledge workers" -- people who apply their intellect to a given situation, to create options or solutions. It can be very satisfying work, but it does not fully meet our instinctive need to "do" or "make," because while our work is important it isn't concrete. So we find opportunities to make things.
If you have seen the piles of pots in our house, you know what I mean. Amy and I have been in Debbie Staub's ceramics class since 1997. We joke that the accumulation of pots is making our house sink lower and lower. But we keep at it because making attractive usable objects out of wet clay is wonderfully satisfying for a part of us that needs to hold what we have done.
I have found the quantity of pots we have made frees me from any anxiety about losing any "special" pot. Over time, some of our pots seem particularly wonderful, but my favorites change, and I have learned that if one breaks and another appears, I don't need to care much about the change. For someone who tends to be over-attached to "things," the huge number of pots we have made over 13 years has made it very easy for me to say, "Any of these I've made may break, but I can always make another!"
And so today, as I was thinking about this posting, I was making the loaf of bread in the picture. I was making a long-rising loaf (the kind that rises overnight and into the next day); in this case I was using a little oat flour, a little whole wheat, and the rest white flour. I baked the bread on a baking stone I had made in ceramics class using a "slab roller." During the first 20 minutes of baking, when the bread bakes at 450 degrees F or higher, the stone broke into four pieces. Remarkably, it didn't just crack, it moved, leaving a gap between the parts. I had always assumed that when my baking stones break, they do so because of a minute air bubble or other fault in the clay. But the way in which this stone separated leaves me wondering whether the bread, which doubles in size during those first hot minutes, had stuck to the stone and actually broken it as the loaf rose up and out. In any case, this oven event was a simultaneous "making" and "unmaking." I will make a new baking stone; the bread was delicious.
And so today, as I was thinking about this posting, I was making the loaf of bread in the picture. I was making a long-rising loaf (the kind that rises overnight and into the next day); in this case I was using a little oat flour, a little whole wheat, and the rest white flour. I baked the bread on a baking stone I had made in ceramics class using a "slab roller." During the first 20 minutes of baking, when the bread bakes at 450 degrees F or higher, the stone broke into four pieces. Remarkably, it didn't just crack, it moved, leaving a gap between the parts. I had always assumed that when my baking stones break, they do so because of a minute air bubble or other fault in the clay. But the way in which this stone separated leaves me wondering whether the bread, which doubles in size during those first hot minutes, had stuck to the stone and actually broken it as the loaf rose up and out. In any case, this oven event was a simultaneous "making" and "unmaking." I will make a new baking stone; the bread was delicious.
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