Pottery & Poetry & Life
First published 29 August 2022
Next weekend I’m taking part in an event called Potfest in Melton Mowbray, an event for makers of pots and other things out of clay.
This completes a cycle for me that started many years ago.
There is no way I would have completed that cycle without all the help, inspiration and support I’ve had from family and friends.
And the wheel is going to keep on turning!
Writing into Life
Lydia gave me a gentle nudge in the early hours and I went downstairs to open the back door for her, propping it open so that she could enjoy some morning air, which I knows she likes to do, while sheltering inside. It gives her a chance to go and have a ‘peepie’ if she needs one and I go down later to close it, as expected finding her now curled up in her chair.
My lower back is aching a bit after my exertions of yesterday, balancing on a stepladder that I’d positioned so that I could reach the far corners of the walls I was painting. I knew I hadn’t strained my back – I’d been careful and I have Qigong and yoga to thank for giving me flexibility and strength that I wouldn’t have otherwise. I did, however, feel that I’d stretched muscles that I wouldn’t otherwise have stretched, and decided to make myself a cup of tea for comfort, to take back to bed. It must have worked because I didn’t wake until after 9am and I felt I’d had a reasonably deep sleep for a few hours.
It was the ‘Boot and Shoe’ walk – that I also call the ‘woodland walk’ – for Lydia and me this morning, the name coming from the house nearby. She was sniffing and pulling most of the way so I don’t know what scent or scents she’d picked up on, but they were strong.
After coming home and giving Lydia her breakfast, I decided to make some blueberry muffins. I don’t feel like my usual breakfast foods at the moment – even poached eggs on toast which I normally love as a brunch – and muffins seemed like a good option. I’d bought a large tray of blueberries when I went shopping yesterday and they are a good nutritious fruit.
For a standard cake mix I use a basic formula of equal quantities of butter or margarine, sugar and flour in a ratio of 4, 4 and 4 plus two eggs. This morning, I had 12oz of baking margarine in a tub leftover from when I’d made a cake a couple of weeks ago, so I used that as the starting measure. Deciding that I didn’t want my muffins too sweet, I weighed out 8oz of sugar instead of 12oz. I’m quite happy to use metric measures but this morning stuck to imperial as it made it easy with the amount of margarine I was starting with. Six eggs, a sprinkling of salt, 12oz of self-raising flour – plus a little extra baking powder just to help the muffins be as light and fluffy as they can be – an unmeasured quantity of blueberries and a splash of evaporated milk completed the mix.
I’d preheated the oven to 180 degrees centigrade and spooned the mixture into 18 paper cases. I baked them initially for 20 minutes and then moved the muffins from the top shelf to the lower shelf and the ones from the lower shelf to the higher shelf to help them all cook evenly. I set the timer for another 10 minutes but got engrossed in writing this post and didn’t hear it go off! The muffins, however, are just nicely browned, not burnt, and I am now waiting for them to cool down so that I can try one, or two, or more.
The carbs should help to set me up for some more painting this afternoon. Having finished the walls I’m now turning to woodwork that was done not so long ago but needs a bit of freshening up in places. It shouldn’t take long and won’t be anywhere near as strenuous as yesterday’s efforts. I do find the process of painting soothing, so I’ll just take my time and it’ll get done.
As it turned out, the small pot of paint that was in the garage, that I thought was a water-based satin white for woodwork, was actually a matt white emulsion. I only discovered this after I’d painted over with it in a few places but it’ll be fine. I’ll buy a pot of the paint that I need tomorrow and go over it again.
There’s also a skylight window frame that needs doing, so I started to prepare that by giving it a good clean with some sugar soap solution. I was too tired to start painting it today as it will need careful concentration – including masking tape application in places – to make sure I do a proper job of it. It will take a couple of coats and I also need to try and reach the outside pane to clean it. I cleaned the inside pane today but I may need my steam cleaner for the outside.
Positioned at the top of the stairs, I used a combination of a chair, stepladders and a left-side-step on to my ‘strategically placed’ filing cabinet today and was able to reach all parts of the skylight frame. It’s going to be a job for later in the week and probably going on into next weekend.
Trev’s back after going out earlier. He sampled and approved the muffins and I’ve now reached the 28th day of my latest 28-day writing cycle, so I’m taking a short break from writing new posts and will publish an earlier post each day instead, starting with ‘A Bag of Clay’ that includes a poem. Hope you enjoy it.
My books continue to be available on Amazon, in paperback, for Kindle and on Kindle Unlimited:
A Woman, a Dog & a Blog: Writing into Life
Rules, Rhymes, Recovery, Recipe, Random: Glad About Life
First published 25 July 2021
Today I sat outside turning a piece of clay from one form into another. It’s called ‘art’ and I love it.
I have limited tools and equipment, so improvised, and just became profoundly absorbed in the process of ‘doing’.
The end result may not be classed as a ‘masterpiece’, but it’s my ‘mixed up piece’, and that’s what counts.
I’m looking forward to spending many more happy hours making things out of clay. It’s a wonderful medium to work with, providing all sorts of possibilities to explore.
Continuing the story of Lydia and Me
I decided that my tired mind would benefit from a bit of focused activity so I turned to cleaning up my creative corner in the lounge.
After a walk with Lydia and a short meditation, I set to.
Bowls of dry clay are now outside, soaking up water, until they are ready to be reconstituted into that malleable substance that is so versatile.
I’m moving in a different direction now in my work with clay. I have no idea what that direction is, only that it is different.
It feels good, to have tidied and sorted, thrown out, re-organised.
With my ‘plan’ for pottery now in place, I turn to poetry.
There is a meeting of the poetry group coming up, and our theme this month is ‘A painting’. The remit is to interpret this as broadly as we want to (which of course is our prerogative anyway, as creators/writers).
My poem is this:
A painting
A painting
can be anything
you want it
to be
A flower
A wall
A tree
Brush goes into pot
Paint loads
Hand holds
And then it flows
Wherever
and however
you want it
to go
The mark is made
and then it’s gone
in the blink
of an eon
Is the painting
in the pot?
Or on the wall?
Where does the call
to paint
come from?
Is the painting
in the mark
or the mark
on the canvas
or the wall
or the wood?
It can be good
to paint
or not
It just depends
on what is in
the paint
and what is in
the pot
© Maggie Baker – Glad the Poet – 2025
I do now feel a sense of mental energy coming through; the tiredness was temporary; doing something constructive helped.
One of the fellow potters that I meet up with occasionally at the #pottermanstudio used to be an art therapist.
She told me that she no longer works as an art therapist because there is no basis of evidence that art is therapeutic.
I’d come to the same conclusion myself, although am also now going to contradict myself because I do believe that art can be therapeutic. It just depends on a lot of other factors such as context, timing and the weight of influences going on in a person’s life and head at any one time.
When I was an inpatient in a psychiatric hospital back in the 90s, I went along to art classes in the hope of finding them helpful, but they made me feel much worse.
I had a degree in art and design, but in those classes I was only able to produce work that most 6-year-olds would be embarrassed about. At least, that was how I felt at the time.
Subsequently and periodically I’ve gained some benefit from drawing – particularly life drawing – but I found more therapeutic benefit from smashing rocks with a sledge hammer when I worked as a volunteer on the Appalachian Trail #ATC. I’ve also found typing and other repetitive tasks – addressing and stuffing envelopes, for example – therapeutic, in different ways.
When I worked at a small publishing unit – part of the #Longman publishing group – we used to send marketing mailshot work to the same psychiatric hospital that I stayed in myself a few years later. The stuffing of envelopes with marketing materials was deemed to be therapeutic for some of the patients, and, based on my own experience, I believe it probably was.
It isn’t just the stuffing of the envelopes – or whatever simple repetitive task it is that you are doing – it’s also the experience that you have while doing it. Stuffing envelopes alone is highly unlikely to be particularly therapeutic – although it may pay bills if you’re doing it to earn money – but in a supportive group environment it can be very calming.
I set something similar up in a Buddhist community that I stayed at for a while, after my breakdown, helping to raise funds for the community. We sat around a table in the Temple and it was very meditative, for a while at least.
When you’ve got a lot of inner turbulence going on, it’s hard to find something – anything – to settle on for any length of time. It’s important to keep looking for and finding whatever it is that gets you through, until the next time you have to start looking for and finding whatever it is that gets you through.
This brings me to one of my ‘Rules for Self Management’ that I haven’t referred to for a while:
Rule No. 5: Don’t underestimate the therapeutic value of envelope stuffing (but don’t overestimate it either).
I’m glad I’m no longer envelope stuffing – either therapeutically or for a living – and am happy to be steadily working with clay in a creative way. This is therapeutic for me now, but it wasn’t before. A lot of other work needed to be done before it could be.
Glad About 
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