The Clay’s Perspective: The Weight of the Attached Piece

​It is one thing to watch a stray pot across the studio collapse on the wheel; it is another thing entirely when you were thrown from the same batch of clay. When you are the lid to a vessel, or the handle to a pitcher, you aren’t just an observer. You are part of the set. Their structural integrity determines how you sit in the world.
​The Myth of the Stoic Stone
​We often misunderstand the Stoics. We think they ask us to be fired stone—cold, unyielding, and dry. But the true Stoic accepts that when an attached piece suffers, the eyes will leak. Those tears are what the ancients called Propatheiai—the natural, reflexive “first movements” of a soul that gives a damn. To bottle them up isn’t strength; it’s a refusal to accept the reality of your own design. You are clay, and clay reacts to moisture.
​The goal isn’t to stop the feeling; it’s to stop the feeling from becoming a structural flaw. As the poet Rilke suggested, we must let everything happen to us: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.
​The Danger of Softening
​The hardest part of watching an attached piece warp—whether through the slow decay of health or the self-inflicted heat of poor choices—is the temptation to re-wet yourself. You see the gap growing between the pot and the lid. You see the cracks forming in their foundation. Your instinct is to soften your own edges, to turn back into slurry, and pour yourself into their voids to hold them together.
​But there is a physics to the soul that we cannot ignore: You cannot be the clay for two people. If you soften yourself to fill their cracks, you lose the hardness required to be a pillar. Eventually, you aren’t “fixing” the pot; you’re just becoming a puddle alongside it.
​The Duty of Presence
​There is a sobering necessity in “maintaining” while in their presence. It is perhaps the highest form of love—to remain structural when the other piece is shaking. It isn’t about being “positive” (which often feels like a lie); it’s about being constant.
​In the words of Simone de Beauvoir, we often feel the “unjustifiable violation” of watching someone break. Yet, by staying fired—by refusing to crack just because they are cracking—you provide the only stable thing left in their world. You become the witness.
​”Grief is the price we pay for love.” — Queen Elizabeth II
​Sitting Askew
​Sometimes, the most compassionate thing you can do is to remain fired. You stay at your highest temperature. You accept that because the other piece has warped, the fit will no longer be perfect. You will rattle. You will sit askew.
​It is a quiet agony to remain whole while the piece you were made for breaks. But a broken pot with a solid lid still has a shape; two broken pieces are just shards in the scrap bin. We must remain whole, if only to prove that the clay was good to begin with.
​To Think On:
​”No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” — C.S. Lewis
​”The most important thing in illness is never to lose heart.” — Nikolai Lenin
​”Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart.” — Marcus Aurelius
​The Clay’s Perspective: When the kiln gets this hot, the goal isn’t to stay cool—that’s impossible. The goal is to stay structural. Be the piece they can lean on, even if you are vibrating with the heat. When the fire finally dies down, the world needs the pieces that held their shape.