{"id":11246,"date":"2025-07-27T17:34:01","date_gmt":"2025-07-27T21:34:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/urns-for-living-and-the-art-of-trusting-time-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2025-07-27T17:34:01","modified_gmt":"2025-07-27T21:34:01","slug":"urns-for-living-and-the-art-of-trusting-time-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/urns-for-living-and-the-art-of-trusting-time-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Urns for Living and the Art of Trusting Time \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
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Ceramics came into my life the way the bird divinations<\/a> had a year earlier \u2014 suddenly, mysteriously, as a coping mechanism for the confusions and cataclysms of living. I was reeling from a shattering collision with one of life\u2019s most banal and brutal truths \u2014 that broken people break people \u2014 and I needed to make, to do the work of unbreaking, in order to feel whole again; I needed something to anchor me to the ongoingness of being alive, to the plasticity of being necessary for turning trauma into self-transcendence. <\/p>\n

A daily creative practice is a consecration of the indestructible in us and a technology for trusting time. Overcome by the need to make something breakable that nonetheless holds, I started taking weekly pottery lessons with the most wonderful teacher<\/a>. Every day I sat at the wheel on my own for hours, centering<\/a> and looking for my center. The skin on the edge of my palms grew raw. My nails cracked, fell off. I started dreaming in clay. <\/p>\n

One morning, I awoke possessed by the urge to make small symbolic vessels for burying what no longer serves that needs to be left behind (beliefs, projections, habits of being), but also for safekeeping what is most worth holding on to, nurturing, fighting for \u2014 in a relationship, in a vocation, in the soul. <\/p>\n

I called them urns for living.<\/p>\n

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Somehow, they didn\u2019t feel different from my primary writing practice \u2014 all creative work springs from the same source: to comprehend our human experience, to give shape to our suffering and our joy, to find our way to each other and back to ourselves in this wilderness we live in beneath the canopy of one hundred trillion synapses capable of sorrow and of song.<\/p>\n

I made an urn a day. I used everything from century-old typesetter\u2019s letters to children\u2019s stamp sets to impress on each of them the words HOLD ON LET GO in a closed loop along the perimeter \u2014 a reminder that our necessary losses<\/a> anneal who we are, that what we keep of our shatterings composes the mosaic of our lives, that the process is ever ongoing. <\/p>\n

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Each urn is a different shape and color. Some have a ghostly great blue heron \u2014 the closest thing I have to a spirit animal<\/a> \u2014 lurking in the glaze. Some are emblazoned with TRUST TIME. Some cracked, some broke, most had a mind of their own about glazing orthogonal to the vector of my intent. All are numbered sequentially with the day count. All are imperfect, uneven, and entirely their own thing \u2014 like the people I love the most. <\/p>\n

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I decided to make them for forty-one days, then start giving them away on my forty-first birthday (which is tomorrow) to people who have made my life more livable \u2014 some to pillars of my private world, and the rest to you: Support from readers makes my life literally livable by putting food on my table and books on my shelves, yes, but also contributes to what makes it worth living \u2014 without a constellation of kindred spirits, without the sense that one is not alone in one\u2019s values and enthusiasms, there is only the maddening soliloquy of our infinite loneliness in conversation with itself. <\/p>\n

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To account for the merciful fact that I am a human and not a factory \u2014 there are only 41 urns \u2014 and to avoid the rude privilege-mongering of auctions, I will let the impartial hand of chance distribute them: To enter the raffle, make a donation<\/a> by August 5 in any amount that is right for you, but make sure it has the number 41 somewhere in the amount, whether it is $1.41 or $41.00 or $410.00 or $1,000.41. (This will help me separate the urn raffle from the regular donations.) Let us favor morality over mathematics \u2014 no manipulation of probability by making multiple entries: just one per person, so we may remember that we are all equals as children of chance.<\/p>\n

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As to the outcome of my experiment in trusting time: Sometime around day 30, I realized that beneath the surface of my awareness something tectonic had begun shifting in me, rearranging my emotional landscape. My surrender to the process \u2014 of making and of grief, that eternal equation of holding on to oneself while letting go of one\u2019s loss \u2014 had changed me, changed the room in my heart filled with clay into a chamber full of song. <\/p>\n

Suddenly, in rushed the world with all its wonder, everything I had stopped seeing or ceased being able to imagine \u2014 fireflies, lichen, love. <\/p>\n

In letting go, I had discovered the thing most worth holding on to: the knowledge that the imagination of life is always greater than that of the living. <\/p>\n

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