Waining crescent, mid February, 2026
As we get back to the new moon, I’m reviewing my writing over the past month or so. The lunar cycle is how I’ve decided to find rhythm in life now that I’m no longer a student or a worker conforming to someone else’s schedule. A pottery is full of rhythmic activity and requires a close attention to timing and cycles. Like the weather, many of the basic ceramic processes have to do with the water cycle. I am constantly watching how clay is dries, rehydrating it recycle into new pots, or firing it into vitrified, non-porous ceramics. These processes lack any absolute consistency though. For example, this weekend is very wet. I am writing in my living room at mid-day with all the lamps on in what feels like dusk because of heavy cloud cover. Under these conditions it might take a pot three or four days to dry out enough to be trimmed, while, if it were really sunny, it might be too dry if I were to leave it uncovered for a single night. This sensitivity to humidity is one of the ways that pottery keeps me quite flexible to the changing weather conditions and requires a good deal of adaptability in daily routine. Zooming out slightly from the day to day though, I’ve felt the need for some broader consistent pattern by which to structure my making, my time, my sense of self. The lunar cycle has been what I’ve chosen to follow, and now, I am about to complete my first uninterrupted cycle of the moon spent working at Atlanta Studio Pottery.
Over the past month, I’ve laid the groundwork for what an uninterrupted month of making might look like. Each week, I make two to three forms which I try to complete during that week. Initially, I thought that this might look like throwing one day, trimming and handling the next, then repeating for the second form and in that way getting through four days with the fifth for whatever extra bits needed doing, some experimentation, and a big end of week clean up. In practice, it’s quite hard for me to do a single task the whole day and most days I throw one set of forms in the morning and then do whatever other studio tasks are at hand in the afternoon. In this way, I can watch the initial drying of the pots from the morning and get them to a point where they are firm enough to be more safely stored overnight while also breaking the day up into different activities. I still try to make this process take basically four or at most four and a half days so that on Friday I can spend some time experimenting with new shapes or techniques.
This arrangement of the week is one of the basic units I work with to articulate the rhythm of the lunar cycle. As I slowly develop the studio, more and more tasks will round out the studio schedule. Mixing glazes, loading the kiln, packing work, etc all have their own rhythms to add to the flow.
The importance of the lunar cycle then becomes giving a narrative shape to the collection of weekly tasks. I crave a sense of meaning and direction. The pottery tasks are deeply meaningful, but they need to be cradled inside some larger framework in order for that meaning to be legible. The most obvious framework for meaning that is socially provided is commercial success. I can’t discount this framework; it is a practical necessity, but not the structure on which I want to build my sense of reward, progress, satisfaction with the work that I’m doing.
Over this past month, I’ve experienced the lunar cycle as a movement of adventure outwards and then retreat. In very practical pottery terms, this has meant that the waxing side of the month was spent trying out new forms, experimenting with different ways of organizing the week, testing new ways of reclaiming my clay, making my lunch, walking to the studio etc. and the waining half was spent sticking to some of these routines and relying more on the comfort of repetition than the excitement of novelty.
The reward and sense of progress in that has come from the sense of setting out from a position of relative comfort towards a frontier of novelty and then being able to turn around and go back, bringing with me some of the adventures and new experiences while knowing that I am also returning to something comfortable and secure. Adventure and return is one of the most basic, narrative arcs that we use to shape stories and it pretty easily presented itself as a way of linking my activities to the lunar cycle.
Formally, this story maps onto the progress of the moon in relation to the sun as well. For the waxing half of the cycle the moon moves until it is furthest from the sun at the full moon. For the waining half of the cycle, it comes around the other side of the earth and returns to its closest point with the sun.
I’ve then also tried to understand my own emotional state through this cycle. Spending so much of every day alone and quietly working with only whatever sense of structure, reward, security, and direction I can give myself, there is a lot of space for the exaggeration of emotion, for getting inside my own head. Sometimes, that can be really lovely. In good moments, I can feel more deeply engaged in the task that I’m working on, or more absorbed in the music or book I’m listening to than I would otherwise. But in the more fragile moments, there’s very little support in the form of external indications of what a reasonable response is, or the leveling influence of everyday conversation to guide me back to a more stable frame of mind. In this relative absence of social and professional context to give shape to my psychological states, I’ve felt a great deal of vulnerability to pretty strong shifts in mood and general outlook on the world.
So this past month, I’ve tried to maintain a type of ongoing report with the moon which has given structure to these emotional fluctuations. The arc I went in hoping to ride through the month was, like the pottery cycle, a first half of increasing openness and stretching away from comfort and familiarity followed by a return from that frontier to a quiet, affirming and secure sense of rest. Emotional shifts are inevitable, interesting, not to be avoided. But without any sense of predictability or structure, they are unguided and the work and exhaustion that comes from a constantly shifting inner world is experienced without a stabilizing sense of purpose.
I recognize that within any four week span, I’ll likely have moments of extreme happiness, sadness, enthusiasm, aimlessness, and so on. I have often felt a tendency to try to analyze these emotional states, and, through this analysis, to rationalize my emotions into something explainable and thus controllable. Control, consideration for others, insight into myself, these are all good things, but I also think that my rational capacity to control my psychological state through self-analysis falls short of my actual emotional range. Ignoring this fact and turning away from that which can not be rationalized within myself is a type of violence against the fullness of the emotional range of being human. But trying to yoke that emotional range to a consistent cycle like that of the moon isn’t trying to silence it, it is just trying to give it structure which forms the foundation for a more trusting relationship.
I’m still working out the foundations of my relationship with the moon. Some people claim to be strongly affected by the full moon, or by other astronomical objects. I don’t feel that sensitivity as something inevitable. I’ve often enjoyed looking at the moon before, but without trying to develop this relationship along the lines I am trying to develop it, my mood would not be particularly affected by whether the moon is full or new. Now, each evening as I walk back from the pottery or whenever I’m outside, I try to find the moon. I see where it is in its journey and I think about the journey I am laying out for myself across the coming weeks. I try to intertwine our stories so that, as its traveling companion, I can rely on it a little bit for a sense of shared experience.
At the waxing crescent moon, later mid Feb
I’ve taken a while to work through this blog post. Perhaps it is the quiet of the new moon keeping me more concerned with the intimate things close at hand. Perhaps it’s my excitement at the first load of pots going through the kiln; shepherding that process along has been my priority in a way that I realize has taken away from the blog writing and the instagram posting.
I left the above fragment unpublished until now because it feels incomplete. All of what I’ve been thinking about has had to do with these arcs along which we tell stories about ourselves and the world. The lunar cycle is one of those arcs that I’m working on developing a relationship with, but I couldn’t manage to get the blog post to feel that it had completed its journey and come back to its own version of the new moon. I talked about the moon and I as traveling companions. Perhaps really I am asking it to be my guide and I got lost somewhere on the journey home. I have started to think that we are much better at setting out on journeys than coming home. So many of our cultural stories are about going away, growing up, starting new things. Coming home, putting down the walking stick, deciding that you’ve gone far enough for this journey, those parts of stories are just as important as the setting out and I am realizing that that is actually the part of the lunar cycle that I find most difficult to accommodate myself to.
In fact, I can’t get much of the last cycle to fit into something that feels like a completed narrative. The pots are now cool and it is time to assess and begin a new making cycle. There, that’s something, a round of making completed. But that’s about as far as the sense of completion goes.
The moon is not a biological being. Along any time scale that we can feel, the moon is absolutely constant in its rotation around the earth. This consistency lacks the faltering changeability of life. I’ve said I want to develop a relationship with the moon. I need to meet it halfway somehow. I start to see that I can’t really take the moon in isolation. The moon, as experienced on earth, is part of a broader ecological system, and in order to weave it into the meaning-making structure of my own life, I need to take into account the larger context in which I view it. Cycles like the lunar cycle, the year, night and day provide a stable scaffolding around which to grow. Those cycles have been there my whole life and they do form the basis of much of how I’ve structured my life. But they’ve also been hidden behind the cultural practices which themselves grew around those astrological structures to the point of obscuring them.
Just about any seasonal festival has its basis in an expression of gratitude for the consistency of the year. The foundation of any belief in divinity is at least partly in the fact that day follows night and night follows day and that the seasons will change in a more or less orderly way and that the days will grow longer and shorter in an exact pattern. This consistency is so different from the flexibility and changeability which form the basis of biological life. From within this changeability, it is deeply reassuring to exist within some sort of larger pattern which feels secure.
Between that absolute consistency and human changeability lie the structures of ordering and meaning making. The basic material of these structures is stories. Stories are flexible and changeable like people; they can adapt to new times, bring in new characters, but, from the moon and the stars and the sun they derive a predictability that weaves the lives of changeable humans into an orderly universe.
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Okay, I think I need to step back from some of the grand philosophizing for now. In a way, I think metaphysical abstraction is a way of escaping from the worries of the stories I’m actually involved in right now. Thinking is such general and expansive terms is doing the story weaving work as close as possible to the absolute orderliness of the moon, the stars, and the sun. But there’s a lot going on in the more specific details here in Atlanta that need weaving into the structure.
Here, there is the desire to yoke the human rhythms of the pottery and my daily life to these celestial cycles. The completion of this first arc is marked by that first kiln load of pots. Among them are some really decent pieces. To celebrate this completion, I went back to Tuscaloosa for a few days and spent time with my parents. I also stopped posting for a week and embraced the privacy that came with that. Ben and I had friends over last weekend, we made dumplings to celebrate the lunar new year.
These activities were more or less haphazardly thrown at the new moon. They are all attempts to build on this foundation of the lunar cycle. Now, as the new cycle begins, I start to look for points of repetition, rhythms within the structure which give a sense of reassurance in consistency. At the beginning of the last lunar cycle, I tested several dozen different glazes and fired my kiln. Throughout the month, I experimented with a variety of different shapes and then produced a kiln’s worth of those forms, glazed in the chosen results of the experiments from the beginning of the month. This month, I need to focus on finding places to begin selling work. By the end of this lunar cycle, I’d like to have a relationship with at least one store where I can sell my pieces. I also want to explore clays that I dig straight from the Georgia soil. Georgia has lots of usable clay and I want to start testing my ability to work with this local material. I want to spend at least two weeks in a full production cycle, not experimenting with new forms but producing a set of cups, bowls, and mugs at my maximum capacity. I also want to write consistently, not just as a summary at the end of each week, but as a daily practice that allows for deeper and more structured reflection.
These goals are the contents of the bag that I take with me as I begin this new journey-lunar-cycle. Most likely, not everything will get used in the course of the journey and it may well be that there are other things which have either snuck their way into my bag or which I’ll pick up and put in it along the way. But from the inward looking darkness of the new moon, these goals present themselves as companions on this next lunar expedition. From new moon until the next full moon on March third, I’ll watch the moon get fuller in the sky as it stretches away from the sun to its fullest point. There will be a full lunar eclipse on that day and I’ll have to figure out what that means for my month-story. From now till then, I’ll experiment, explore, discover new things and ways of working. After that, I will start turning around. This will be the harder part of the month, I think. What does it mean to turn around and retreat? How do you make yourself stop when you know that there are more interesting and important things around the next bend? How do you keep your eyes lively and attentive for that which you haven’t yet seen when you know you are beating back along a path that you’ve already walked out on?
Until the next update along the way…