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Centering in Pottery, Poetry, and the Person

M. C. Richards was a potter, teacher, and poet, and her 1962 book is a story of transformation. In his Foreward to the 25th Anniversay Edition of M.C.'s truly subversive book, Matthew Fox writes, I consider this book one of the great works of American philosophy: it is so cosmological, so feminist (without once using that term), so original, so full of wisdom, so post Cartesian, so nondualistic, so moral, and so fully a part of the mystical tradition of the West that one wonders from what source it arrived in our world. This is a prophetic and mystical book. Such books are dangerous. They are the kind dictators burn, churches tend to ignore, and consumer cultures leave on the shelf. For they have the power to awaken, to stir, to disturb, and to transform.

After forty years, CENTERING remains as relevant as ever. The good news is that it's still in print. M.C. observes that, in our society, ordinary education and social training seem to impoverish the capacity for free initiative and artistic imagination. We talk indepedence, but we enact conformity . . . Brains are washed (when they are not clogged), wills are standardized, that is to say immobilized. Someone within cries for help. There must be more to life than all these learned acts, all this highly conditioned consumption. A person wants to do something of his own, to feel his own being alive and unique. He wants out of bondage. He wants in to the promised land.