Listen to Jim’s podcast:
http://redclaydiary.com/
or read Jim’s story below:
Ruby’s Yacht Carries Me from Then to Now
I stop by the potter’s shed to watch him thump his glistening, malleable clay, shaping it to his whim, perhaps not listening closely to what it speaks to him.
“Go gently, brother, respect who I was and make me into what I will be,” the clay pleads, shape-shifting slowly under the potter’s hand.
The potter works on, kneading and pounding and spinning the red clay mass until it begins to imitate an object he can recognize.
“I was once like you,” the clay continues. “I lived, loved, died, eventually turned to dust. And here I am, returned to your shop, filled with the juice of life, prepared to accept my fate as your next project.”
The potter pauses, barely sensing these utterances, then begins the process of finalizing this new life, re-birthing the mixture of fluid and earth, settling on its appearance and eventual usage, the puppet-master bringing to life a life already awaiting re-emergence.
As the eleventh-century Persian poet Omar Khayyam said, “For I remember stopping by the way To watch a Potter thumping his wet Clay: And with its all-obliterated Tongue It murmur’d—’Gently, Brother, gently, pray!’”
Omar, writing his Rubaiyat all those centuries ago, rides with me as I pass through life from dust to eventual dust. At the age of thirteen, I first read his many Rubaiyat—or verses—and never forgot the poetic images and ponderings about the wonder and silliness of life. I refer frequently to his wit and sagacity.
Omar asks the questions that we all ask of life: Why is some pottery misshapen or cracked or unattractive, even when created by the same Maker? Who makes those decisions? Who decides what is lovely and what is ungainly?
Khayyam admits he does not know the answers, and he ultimately decides that nobody else does, either.
His entire philosophy, basically, is, enjoy the moment, eat the chocolate chip cookie now, don’t worry about the before-now or the hereafter. You can make up theologies and beliefs and templates all you want, but it’s basically a conceit or a delusion to think that you know the Answer.
Reading Omar is kind of liberating. He lifts from you the burden of other people’s temporal and temporary ideas and allows you to do the right thing right now. Hug your family, lend a hand to someone in pain, stay out of other people’s belief systems and dogmas, look to your immediate circumstances for peace and kindness.
As I sail the Rubaiyat—or Ruby’s Yacht—through life, I can still find shards of peace amid the turmoil, largely because of Omar and Ruby
© Jim Reed 2015 A.D.
http://www.jimreedbooks.com/podcast