Notes to the Machines

There is a note taped to the inside door of the kiln that has not come down in years. It reads: You are doing very well. Keep going.

Not sure if he meant the kiln or himself.

My father wrote to his equipment. Formal little requests, with manners. Not labels. Not technical specifications. Please maintain this temperature for this period of time. Thank you. The notes were addressed with the same care as any other correspondence.

The quality of attention you bring to your work is not divisible. You cannot be careless with the equipment and careful with the stone. You cannot be impatient with the heat and patient with the design. It is all the same attention, moving through the same hands. The studio is quiet except for the sounds of things being heated and cooled, shaped and refined. The polishing wheel becomes company. The torch has a voice. You learn what the sounds mean — what they're asking for, what they're telling you, when they're content and when you have a problem.

The courtesy he showed the machines was not sentiment. It was practice. The cultivation of a quality of presence that could not be switched on and off depending on who was watching.

The manners you keep when no one is watching are the only manners that actually belong to you.