Bowls: The Shape of The Soul

“ Clay is molded into vessels, and because of the space where there is nothing, you can carry water,  Space is carved out from a wall, and because of the place where there is nothing, you can receive light. Be empty, and you will remain full….”  -Lao Tsu

When my husband and I moved to Wisconsin, I felt like I had been exiled into a limitless wasteland.  I never felt so alone and unprotected as I looked around the flat surface of this state.  My children and everyone I knew now lived a couple of thousand miles away.  We came to live in this small little town of five thousand, three thousand of which were prisoners in the local prisons, and all I could think of is how to get back home.

After a few years, I knew I was not going back, at least not in the near future. I had been colleting art materials for years and toward the end of my job in the prison running a literacy program, all I could do to keep sane was draw. I couldn’t draw the prisoners, they had eyes in the back of their heads, and it is not good to stare at them without some darn good reason, so I managed to draw the dull rooms and furniture around me.

It came as a slow fever when I started making bowls as a way to express myself artistically at home.  It was a strange obsession that seemed to take a hold of me. I didn’t have much money, and I couldn’t afford to take a pottery class so I used what materials were close at hand. I had a never ending supply of old news papers and brown paper sacks. So, I started layering my paste and paper over and over on balloons and old glass bowls I used for molds.

When I started making the bowls, I felt so alive. Each night I went to bed thinking about the next bowl. It is almost embarrassing now to think how I seemed so completely taken over, but all I could think about then was how to shape, color, and decorate my bowls. It was almost as though I was on a mission.

Interestingly, before I made my poor little papier-mâché bowls, nothing seemed possible.  I was always struggling.  My job at the prison had been robbing me of my physical and emotional health.  They had a recycled air system in the prison and the smoking of the prisoners and guards passed through every air vent. Before I left my prison position,  I had a deep cough for months that doctors were unable to treat successfully. I used up all my sick leave trudging back and froth form doctor to doctor.  I never really felt alive, but when I began to make my bowls I started to feel everything was possible. It was like they were taking on a life of their own, and I was starting to feel happy.

Strangely my making bowls seemed to make everyone around me crazy, but I was just not willing to let go of my creativity, my health, and new happiness. The questions I heard repeatedly were, “Why are you making papier-mâché bowls? What good are they?”

Even after I went on my bowl making rampage,  I never really understood what was going on in me.  What was it about the bowls that compelled me?  What was I finding in their empty shapes?

I started to think about what bowls had meant to me in my life.  I remembered the blue of the bowls that held the hot white milk steaming over sweetened bread on cold morning before school. There were the  bowls my mother used to put our Christmas candies and Easter eggs in on those few special days when there was peace in the house.  I thought about my sisters how they sat with their friends and told their stories with old stained bowls filled with purple globs of goop.  That purple pasty substance then faded  black on their heads only to magically transformed their brown hair into golden blond.  There were bowls to hold straight pins and safety pins, buttons, and thread when mom made us new dresses.  There were large yellow bowls that were filled with icing and cake batter that I used to scrape with my fingers while I sat quietly on a square of news paper on the floor.

Was the bowl making about feeding , nourishing, and transforming myself?  Was I finding in the bottom of those empty bowls the biggest gift of all, myself and my creativity, my soul?

Now, what I need to remember when I struggle or come to empty spaces in my life is the beginning of my love affair with my empty bowls and what I call coincidence, synchronicity, or, most probably, God and his way of encouraging me.  Since my bowl making days, I have came across two books involving bowls quite by accident. These books were about bowls being symbolic of life, women, and ourselves. The book Everyday Sacred A Women’s Journey Home by Sue Bender literally fell off a book shelve into my hands. She starts her book by saying, “This story is about a bowl.” The other book is called Wisdom Bowls Over Coming Fear And Coming Home to Your Authentic Self by Meredith Young-Sowers which I also came across in a surprising way on the Internet.

To me, these books not only affirmed my attraction to bowls, but they helped clarify what I somehow knew on a subconscious level. It also led me to other books on the subject and maybe to write about my own journey.

I don’t know what you would find in your empty bowls, or empty spaces, but maybe you would find a bit of yourself, your story, and your soul?