Musings from afar

This blog post is a reading that I would like to share with you from The Radiant Tarot by Tony Barnstone and Alexandra Eldridge.

Fingers dig into a pile of red clay and tear out an undistinguished mass, shapeless as the world before creation. Plopped down on the wheel and kneaded by hands, it is chaos, full of almost forms - potential being, like a cloud pushed and massaged by the wind. The potter’s wheel turns, and hands dipped in water begin to pull up the spinning clays as if shaping a body’s hips, waist and torso. They then push the centre inward to shape the hollow interior.
Though the outside form is how we name it - as cup or pot- it is the empty inside that makes it useful. When the shape is made, the Kiln fixes its form.
And here it is, the way the ancients conceived of humans, a vessel of earth, massaged with water, filled with air and hardened with fire. All it needs is the wine of the spirit to breathe it into life.
When the cup or pot or bowl goes out into the world, it carries many things and gives use and pleasure and service. Years wheel by, until an elbow or an earthquake knocks it to the floor and it smashes. Swept up and thrown into trash, it enters the earth and becomes clay again. The planet turns. Centuries spin past. One future day, perhaps, that clay will be dug up again and be part of an undistinguished mass on some potters table. shapeless as the world before creations and waiting to be born.

It is a simple yet magical thing to create with Air, Earth, Fire and Water.