The photos with this post are of some of our recent pots, fresh from the raku kiln.

I read this today (via the daily meditations from the Centre for Action and Contemplation);

In The Silent Cry German theologian Dorothee Sölle [1929–2003] writes “I think that every discovery of the world plunges us into jubilation, a radical amazement that tears apart the veil of triviality.” [1] When the veil is torn apart and our vision is clear there emerges the recognition that all life is connected—a truth not only revealed by modern science but resonant with ancient mystics. We are all one, connected and contained in a Holy Mystery about which, in all its ineffability, we cannot be indifferent. Sölle maintains that radical amazement is the starting point for contemplation. Often we think of contemplation as a practice that belongs in the realm of the religious, some esoteric advanced stage of prayer that only the spiritually gifted possess. This is not the case…. The nature of contemplation as I describe it here is one that lies well within the capacity of each of us. To use a familiar phrase, contemplation amounts to “taking a long loving look at the real.”…

That ‘connection’ thing has increasingly been a central part of the meaning through which I try to live. It seems such a simple idea, almost to the point of cliche, until you feel it, somewhere deep inside and then the journey starts again.

I have come to think of the human experience as a process of birth/disconnection, followed by a slow process of realising that our cherished (you might even say fetishised) individuality is mostly illusion.

That is not to say that our unique agency is illusion, rather that our being exists in the fullest sense when we are part the ‘great connection’ that has many names- including ‘The Christ’, which (through the writings of Richard Rohr) I now think of as another name for everything.

No matter how real my experience of this connection has been, it has only ever been fleeting. It comes and goes as encounter, or with the unexpected tingle of trancendence. So it is that I have found that certain practices help me to make what is ephemeral more fully present. Above all, I find this in creativity- writing and shaping things, pursuing ideas in abstract even if they often remain out of reach. I have written before about the idea of theopoetics which describes this same spiritual process rather well.

The strange thing about the creative life is that as we create, many of us have described a feeling in which the ideas/tunes/pictures/shapes/words etc. that flow from us are not ‘ours’, rather they have been given to us in some way as if we are not the origin, but somehow the channel. These experiences are special, in fact the things I am most ‘proud’ of having created are mostly things that are not mine at all, rather at some level they have been ‘co-created’.

The point here is not to make any crazy supernatural claims – after all, mystical experiences always seem madness to those who did not experience them – rather to honour again the recognition that all of life is connected, and that ‘radical amazement’ is a very ordinary and real part of this connection…