“Stories move in circles.

They don’t go in straight lines. So it helps if you listen in circles. There are stories inside stories and stories between stories, and finding your way through them is as easy and as hard as finding your way home.

And part of the finding is the getting lost.

And when you’re out, you start to look around and to listen.”

Deena Metzger in Writing for Your Life quoting members of A Traveling Jewish Theater

Sue Bender’s Everyday Sacred: A Woman’s Journey Home begins with the story of bowls. She began making bowls before the birth of her son: more than 30 years before the publishing of the book. The imperfection of bowls. The openness of bowls. The stories of bowls. She recounts the story of a Zen monk and a student. The student travels many miles seeking wisdom. The student asks many questions and the monk refuses to answer his questions. Eventually the monk asks, “Pour me a cup of tea and I will tell you when to stop.” The student pours and pours and eventually the cup is full. He exclaims, “Can’t you see the cup is full? It can hold no more!” “And so it is with you,” the wise teacher answers, “Your mind is full of too many things. Only when you are empty will there be room for more knowledge to come in.”

Like Bender, I love bowls. I have never worked with clay or made a bowl. I am not sure why I haven’t, but I haven’t. I have collected bowls and boxes, which I consider a square cousin of bowls, from everywhere I have traveled. Wood. Clay. Tin. Maybe I have collected bowls to hold stories? Maybe I have collected bowls to be open to each adventure? Maybe I have collected bowls to learn from each step of my journey? I have never thought about it like that before — connecting my interest in bowls with a desire to cultivate a beginner’s mind — but that makes sense. Perhaps the next step in my bowl collecting journey is to turn off my inner critic and make a few bowls and get lost in circles of clay and find more stories.

Bowls speak to these times. If we can find blessings in difficult times, and I believe we are in difficult times, perhaps there is blessing in the emptying I feel occurring. There is emptying in the slowing down of life. There is emptying in the truth being spoken. There is emptying in both the quiet and the revolution. There is emptying in spending time outdoors. There is emptying in seeing and hearing things that I have not seen and heard before. There is emptying in curiosity. There is emptying in creativity. All that is a blessing.