Winter hit hard this year. The kind of cold that makes the studio feel like a walk-in freezer and the kind of snow that turns an hour drive into a white-knuckle adventure. I’ve been splitting my time between twelve-hour shifts at the big paper factory and brief moments in the studio when I can get the propane heater going long enough to make my fingers work. It’s been slow getting back into a rhythm, though that’s winter in rural Pennsylvania: everything takes longer, costs more, and hurts a little.

In the midst of all this cold and overtime and delayed pottery projects, I’ve been learning things. About error embracing. About the weight we choose to carry versus the weight that’s placed on us. About why we need external accountability and what it means to show up even when, especially when, we’d rather stay in bed. These winter weeks have been as much about philosophy as pottery, which is probably just sophisticated procrastination by another name. The lessons are real, even if the pots have been slower to materialize.

On Error Embracing: The Teacher You Didn’t Know You Needed

I cracked three bowls last week pulling them off the bat. Clean breaks, right across the foot ring. The kind of crack that makes you stop and stare because you know, you know, it happened because you rushed. Too eager to get them on the ware board, too impatient to let the clay firm up just another minute or two. My first instinct was the same one I’ve had for years: frustration. That voice that says “you should know better by now.”

Then I stopped myself because I’ve been thinking about this idea of error-embracing. Not error tolerance, that’s different. Tolerance implies you’re putting up with something. Embracing means you’re actually inviting it in, learning from it, maybe even expecting it. Those three bowls taught me something about my timing, about the humidity in the studio right now in January, about the particular clay body I’m using, and how it behaves. They also taught me something about my own impatience, the way I sometimes treat my studio time like factory time, trying to maximize efficiency when maybe that’s not what pottery is asking of me.

There’s a difference between careless errors and productive errors. Careless is not wedging your clay properly and getting air bubbles that blow out in the kiln. That’s just lazy. Productive errors? That’s trying a new glaze combination. That’s testing how thin you can throw a bowl. That’s firing the kiln a little hotter to see what happens. If I’m not making errors, I’m probably not growing. The trick is learning to tell the difference and recognizing that errors are part of the process. They’re not deviations from the path; they’re the path itself.

The Weight of Choice: What We Carry and Why

I threw for three hours one morning before the sun came up. Started at 4:30 with coffee still brewing, hands cold enough that the first few pulls felt stiff and uncertain. By the time I finished, there were seventeen mugs on the ware board and my lower back was reminding me I’m not twenty-five anymore. Nobody gets into pottery for the gym membership, though the physical weight is real: the standing, the centering, the pulling up, the trimming. The loading and unloading of kilns. The packing of pots for shows.

I’ve been thinking about weight in a different way lately. The weight we choose to carry versus the weight that’s placed on us. At the factory, the weight is assigned. You show up, you do the work, you go home. There’s a simplicity to it that I’ve come to appreciate. No decisions about what to make or whether it matters. Just production, efficiency, output. In the studio, every bit of weight is chosen. I chose to throw seventeen mugs that morning instead of sleeping in. I chose to mix that glaze batch instead of watching TV. I chose to fire the kiln on a schedule that means I’ll be up at midnight to shut it down. Every single ounce of this work is weight I’ve picked up and decided to carry.

When you pick yourself, you also pick up everything that comes with it. The business side, the marketing, the inventory, the bookkeeping, the website maintenance, the social media, the email lists, the show applications, the rejection letters, the storage problems, the glaze calculations that don’t work out. You pick up all of it. The Greeks had this myth about Atlas holding up the sky. We use it as a metaphor for carrying heavy burdens, though we forget the rest of the story. Atlas was being punished. It wasn’t a choice; it was a sentence. Some weight is punishment. Some weight is chosen. The trick is knowing which is which. Those seventeen mugs, that’s chosen weight. And every morning I wake up and pick it up again. My back hurts from three hours at the wheel. My hands are dry and cracked from clay. I’ve got a twelve-hour factory shift starting in four hours. This is heavy. It’s my heavy, though.

The Journey Through: When the Mission Becomes the Message

My father and I took a trip to deliver a box of photos to my stepbrother that my mother wanted him to have after she passed. What should have been an hour trip turned into a three-hour white-knuckle adventure through a snowstorm. The weather prediction was wrong, and we were too far gone to turn back. Traffic slowed to a crawl. We pulled off for coffee, debated turning around, then followed a snowplow up the mountain when we saw one pass by. How lucky we were.

When we finally made it to the rehabilitation center where my stepbrother was recovering from a foot injury, we sat with him in the lounge area and went through the box of albums and photos. He told stories from way back. He was quite happy to see all the photos and have all those memories come back. Dad and I felt like maybe we completed some type of mission. This was one of the few times I am glad I pushed on due to sunk cost. Taking some type of small hero’s journey is what both my dad and I needed to do together after mom’s passing. My stepbrother was grateful for all our efforts to make the trip and felt cared for and loved. Something mom would have been proud of us for doing.

Safety-wise we should have picked a better day, though with the start of any trip it is hard to tell what might happen along the way. Many times it is more about the journey rather than the destination or even the mission. That trip through the snow, the white-knuckle driving, following that plow up the mountain, it was all part of what Dad and I needed. A trial by winter. A mission completed together. Some things need to be done, and sometimes you don’t know you needed to do them until they’re done.

Getting Back on the Hook: External Accountability as Art Form

I’ve been slow getting back into the studio. The cold. The overtime. The family adjustments after Mom’s passing. The way motivation freezes right along with everything else in January. I know myself well enough by now to know that I need external pressure to break inertia. Left to my own devices, I can rationalize my way out of anything. “It’s too cold. I’m too tired. I worked overtime. Dad needs help. The clay might freeze. I’ll start next week.” Next week becomes next month becomes spring becomes never.

So I sign up for things. I commit publicly. I put myself on the hook where backing out would mean letting people down. The Bunny Trail show in March isn’t just a sales opportunity; it’s a forcing function. A deadline that won’t negotiate. Steven Pressfield would probably say this is just another way of fighting Resistance. And he’d be right. Resistance loves winter. It loves cold studios and frozen shipments and overtime shifts and family obligations. It weaves them all together into a perfectly reasonable excuse to not do the work.

The Valentine’s vases are my way back in. Small project. Manageable. Something I’ve done before. Ten vases between now and February 14th. And once I’m making those vases, the studio will be warm. The clay will be moving through my hands. The muscle memory will wake back up. That’s how you break inertia. Not with grand gestures, with small commitments that force you to show up. The vases lead to the Bunny Trail inventory. The Bunny Trail leads to spring. Spring leads to the wood kiln project. One thing builds on another, only if you start though. Some people might see external accountability as pressure. And it is. It’s the kind of pressure that keeps coal from being just coal, though. The kind that makes diamonds.

The 90% Friend: Lessons in Incompletion

My buddy Richard stopped by the other day. We sat and had dinner, then he started showing me all of his big projects that he’s working on. Some taking months and even years. Richard has many projects that are 90% complete, though he always loses interest at 90% and never seems to be able to finish anything. He has been that way since I have known him way back in college. Richard has Asperger syndrome, and his deep focus on specific interests is common, often paired with strong memory, pattern recognition, and a preference for logic, structure, and clear rules.

It took some time to get used to hanging out with Richard. I found his focus on one thing interesting and would help him at times with his research. We would travel to libraries and bookstores together, and I would help him make copies of research studies at places like Office Max. We studied Ancient Near Eastern Texts, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Early Christianity, Behavioral Science, Criminal Justice, and many other topics. However, I was never able to get him to study pottery. When you hung out with him, you were along for the ride.

Because of my buddy I have a large library in my home. Like the project on cuneiform I am working on long-term, I have binders of both cuneiform writing, how to write it, and many of the ancient texts that used cuneiform writings. Richard finishes nothing, influences everything though. All these 90% projects scattered through his life like seeds that never quite sprouted. Those seeds fell on other ground too, though. They landed in my library, in my understanding, in my own work. I finish things. I finish pots. I finish kiln loads. I finish these daily posts. Completion is important to me in a way that it isn’t for Richard. Completion isn’t everything, though. Maybe Richard’s 90% projects aren’t failures. Maybe they’re just his way of moving through the world, collecting knowledge, making connections, spreading ideas to people like me who will take them in different directions. He’s like a bee that way, pollinating other people’s gardens with his obsessions.

Through the Snow: The Unglamorous Work That Matters

I didn’t get to make pots one weekend. Worked through the snowstorm both days at the big paper factory. Long shifts. Arrived home late, had to leave early the next morning. The kind of days where you sleep a few hours, wake up in the dark, drive through snow that hasn’t been plowed yet, and do it all over again. The roads were bad. Not impassable, though bad enough that you had to pay attention every second. White-knuckle driving at 5 AM when you’re already tired from yesterday’s shift.

The factory doesn’t close for the weather. Paper doesn’t stop needing to be made because it snowed. Customers don’t care that it’s cold or that the roads are dangerous or that you’d rather be home in your studio making pots. The machines run. Someone has to run them. That someone was me. There’s a discipline to this kind of work that people don’t talk about much. Not the creative discipline of showing up at the wheel every morning. The other kind. The discipline of showing up for work you didn’t choose, work that doesn’t feed your soul, work that’s just work. Showing up in a snowstorm. Showing up tired. Showing up when every part of you would rather be somewhere else.

The truth is this: the factory work pays for the pottery work. The overtime I worked that weekend will buy clay, propane, and glaze materials. It keeps the lights on in the studio. It funds the dream. And without it, there is no pottery business. It’s just an expensive hobby I can’t afford. I think about the romantic version of the artist’s life, the one where you quit your day job and do your art full-time and somehow make it work. And maybe that works for some people. I’m fifty-six years old in rural Pennsylvania with bills to pay and a wood kiln to build and a life that doesn’t fit into anyone’s romantic narrative, though. The factory work is part of the pottery work, even when they feel like opposite things. One funds the other. One teaches discipline that serves the other. One makes the other possible.

Looking Ahead: What’s On the Wheel

The studio needs a deep clean before I can start production in earnest. I have about 500 pounds of reclaimed clay that needs reprocessing, wedging, and kneading it back into usable form. Can’t order fresh clay in winter since shippers don’t always have heated delivery and frozen clay needs extensive work to bring back. That reclaim is already paid for, though, already here, waiting to become something new. There’s a metaphor there about taking what didn’t work and wedging it back into something useful.

Valentine’s Day vases need to be made. Ten of them. The Bunny Trail spring show is coming in March, and I need inventory for that. The wood kiln project looms large; those who gave it to me are waiting, and every day I don’t start is another day they might wonder if they made a mistake. That’s spring work, though. Right now, it’s just about getting back into rhythm. Breaking inertia. Putting myself on the hook. Showing up.

Some days the work is making pots. Some days the work is driving through snowstorms to keep the factory running. Some days the work is sitting with friends who finish nothing yet teach everything. Some days the work is embracing errors and learning from cracked bowls. All of it matters. All of it feeds the whole.

What I Am Reading

I am reading Thinking in Systems: A Primer. A book by Donella Meadows.

Days remaining if I live to 86: 12,802

Thank you for following along and supporting Creek Road Pottery. Every comment, visit, and bit of encouragement makes the long hours worth it. I hope your fall is full of good conversations, hot tea, coffee, creative victories, and the courage to start the things you’ve been putting off.

Until next time,
Alford Wayman
Artist/ Owner

Connect with Creek Road Pottery LLC
Website | Shop | Blue Sky | Instagram | Facebook | Newsletter