A friend recently gifted me with eight or nine ceramic bowls that her husband had made. She has too many and he keeps making them.
I hesitated. They were all SO beautiful!
“No!” my friend exclaimed, “These are his “seconds”. If you look closely, each one is flawed.”
Slowly I put one aside, and then another, and another, being careful to not take too many.
Truth be told I would have taken them all — although I certainly don’t need them all, they were just So Beautiful!
As I was walking out the door, she said, “Don’t you want this one? I just love the colors on the inside.”
Of course I wanted that one! I just didn’t want to be greedy. I took that one too — it’s Stunning!
Heck, I even had the nerve to ask if it would be okay for me to share one or two with a friend (assuming I could bring myself to part with one or two).
“How rude”, I thought to myself, “but we’re friends”, I reasoned.
Except we’re sort of “new friends” if you know what I mean, so I really hope I wasn’t too rude!
As I left, I said, “I feel like a thief!”
My friend assured me, “no, these are all seconds — they’re flawed.”
I placed the bowls on the studio counter so Rebecca and I could “Ooh and aah” over them before I took some back to the house.
The bowls make us to want to have a party. We want to clean the studio and use all of the bowls for finger food.
That’s how festive they feel.
These beautiful bowls are one person’s idea of “seconds”, of flawed pieces of pottery, of an art form that didn’t quite meet the standards that they’d set out to achieve.
So what? They are still beautiful!
Most of us fall short of the standards we want to achieve.
We “fall short” because we’re moving forward, we are growing and expanding our universe. And we keep moving the standards further and further from where we began!
Creation and expansion are imperfect processes.
I appreciate the generosity of my new friend and I love the way I feel when I see and use my beautiful new bowls (“flaws” and all).
There is joy in feeling the heart-or-head-to-hand-to-creation connection coming through the bowls. These bowls are perfect to me, although they might be imperfect to the creator.
Handmade art has loads of qualities and character, and is always made by “imperfect humans”.
The more we’re able to put ourselves into our art, the better and better our art becomes, even when it’s “flawed”!
