Reading passages from Pema Chodrun’s lessons on mindfulness, I found this quote:

“And what we call ego is … grasping on to small parts, which is our personal experience saying, 'I want this and I don’t want that' 'I like this and I don’t like that.' We are grasping onto our limited thinking instead of staying with what’s really possible for us.”

A ceramic sculpture by a Japanese artist grabbed my attention and held onto it for months. Her three white nested bowls were simply elegant. I spent a long time trying to create those bowls. The tighter I held onto the outcome, the slower was my progress. It wasn’t until I let go of that particular result that I began to have fun and move forward on a more satisfying path.

In 2016 when I wrote this blog, I was working with fine glass powders in subtle gradations of aquamarine, soft blues, grays and greens, reminiscent of the distinctive Seihakuji glazes perfected by the Chinese in the eleventh century. After multiple firing operations in the kiln to fuse and mold the glass into vessels, I used grinding and blasting tools to further shape and refine the glass edges and surfaces to achieve the thin-walled translucence and matte surfaces that distinguish Seihakuji porcelain.

One of my pieces from the Seihakuji collection, Laguna Ikebana Bowl, was selected for the Bullseye Projects Ninth Biennial International Juried Kiln-Glass Exhibition for Emerging Artists in June 2016. Others pieces were exhibited at Sandstone Gallery in Laguna Beach CA in the summer of 2015.