Daisy and Tide

Every pot begins as a mound of wet clay that holds no shape at all. What gives it form is pressure, patience, and the decision to stop. This one was stopped at a moment of quiet fullness, its body rounded like a seed about to split. The daisy cut into the surface is not decorative in any simple sense. In Persian and Anatolian folk traditions, the many-petaled sun flower has long stood for the wheel of days, the return of warmth, the insistence of ordinary beauty. The waves below it speak of continuity, of all the water that has moved under every kind of sun. The gold at the rim is a single, restrained gesture, a threshold between the vessel and whatever grows from it. Fill it with a sprig of wild grass, a calendula cutting, or nothing at all. It holds meaning either way.