An Interview With M.C. Richards
Centering, for me, is the discipline of bringing in rather than leaving out; of saying yes to what is most holy as well as to what is most unbearable. The severity of that, as a discipline, is not widely understood.
In Pottery, Poetry, And The Person
We tend to think that strength is all-important, and yet we have a very shallow notion of what strength consists of. For unless our weaknesses play into our strengths we are not as supple as we should be.
Notes On Death And Meditation
The alternating continuity and discontinuity of thought is not merely a metaphor for death: it is death. . . . To let go of the self and enter fully into one’s own mental experience exactly as it is — that is the death process.
The first thing that must be said is that the Minotaur was blind. Her mother — for the Minotaur, actually, was a woman — torn with guilt for her own sins, blinded the Minotaur soon after her birth. She could not bear to see the eyes of her child staring at her from the face of a bull. She blinded her, and then she placed her in the midst of the labyrinth, of which you have probably heard.
One summer day many years ago, on the grass outside the back door to a large white house that had seen better days, a handsome woman sat cross-legged, taking peas from a colander beside her and shelling them into an enameled bowl on her lap. At her skirts, a girl of five or six played with a porcelain doll. After a bit, the child leaned the doll over the bowl of shelled peas and whispered in her ear, “You see, Peggy? That’s how we get peas ready to cook.”
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My father taught me a lot about duty, unwittingly, I suspect. He was an innovator and a free spirit at heart. As a young boy, he had designed, built, and flown his own model airplanes; later, he invented a high-speed camera built upon principles of reflecting light and rotating mirrors. As a man, he railed against convention. Nonetheless, he was a dutiful, obedient son and brother, and thus easily manipulated by his iron-willed Eastern European mother and his introverted, depressed, anti, social sister. His father had died at an early age, and the two surviving women of the household had lived together for as long as I could remember. As the oldest grandchild and favorite nephew of my lonely, doting aunt, I became the pawn and the prize in a tacit game. I sensed that it was mandatory for me to play my part, for the sake of my aunt and grandmother — and, somehow, my father. He and I were linked in this ritual of obeisance.
The pure in heart will avoid the struggles, detour the tar pits, blind their eyes to the sirens. The problem is that in avoiding the paths that contain the tar, you may never reach any destination; in avoiding temptation, you remain pure, but irrelevant. Life is tar pits and sirens.
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