On the drive to Atlanta Monday to get slides processed, I realized that the best work rhythm will be to complete a bowl, then photograph it. Do this before beginning the next one, so that I’ll have truly contemplated the first bowl. There’s a way in which making a really good and true photograph of the bowl helps me know it in a deeper, fuller way.
This is completely different from my inclination to push myself to do two or three or even four bowls at once, for efficiency.
Now that I’m writing this, I start to doubt my recognition. It’s a little scary. It threatens my confidence in being able to produce enough bowls to earn a living with them, to work fulltime.
This new rhythm would emphasize dialogue. The whole process is a two-way conversation between the bowl and me. The new rhythm calls for me to listen more than I’ve been listening. When I emphasize productivity, it’s as if I’m intending talk talk talk talk talk. I think of high productivity, fast productivity, as an ideal to reach. But if I think of this same thing as talk talk talk talk talk, it doesn’t look as ideal.
Yet it feels weird to think of deliberately slowing down. All my life I’ve been the one to “run ahead.” I’m impatient to see around the next curve, to run over the next hill. “Come back, stay with the group,” my fretful camp counselors would call. Even when I was the assistant counselor, I could not stop myself from running ahead of my group instead of patiently shepherding them. (Certainly I was a disappointment as an assistant counselor.)
In making my bowls, I’ve been fretting that I work “so slowly.” I envy artists who are more productive, who work faster or more steadily or for longer hours. Of course, in my own way, my slowness is still about “running ahead.” If I learn a new technique, instead of making twenty more bowls using that technique, I want to “run ahead” to learn another. If I try one thing with a bowl, I want to try twenty more with the same bowl before deciding. And sometimes I try to skip a step or two, which takes more time because eventually I have to come back and do what I missed.
That’s one thing that’s happened with the photography. I was trying to skip the steps of looking at each bowl carefully. What view lets the eye move naturally around the bowl? What is the focal point? And most of all – what view shows the bowl’s spiritual power?
Shooting film without taking time for this step has allowed me to learn a lot about lighting, exposures, warming filters, backgrounds, and more. But it’s not going to show me how to take really good slides of my bowls. Only this first step of careful contemplation will do that.
So I must dare to go even more slowly.
10:11:27 AM 
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