do your best

and forget about the outcome.

Hello, this is Diana from Baur Studio, a newsletter about European life and style - art, ceramics, design, food, wine and gardening and stories - from the Black Forest of southern Germany and the northern Italian wine hills of Piemonte.

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There’s an old story that goes something like this:

A man picked up a handmade mug at a pottery market, looked at the price tag, whistled at the cost and asked the potter, “How long did it take you to make this?”

The potter smiled and said, “Oh, about thirty years.”

When you buy something made by hand, you’re buying a piece of the person who made it: their experience, their failures, their heart and their pride. It takes ridiculously long to become a potter of any quality and just when you think you have it figured out, a pot with chemically-bound water explodes in the kiln, sending shards that knock over other pieces, and you feel like throwing the pots - and the kiln - out the window.

Of course, if it always went well, pottery would be easy, no one would appreciate the complexity of the process and it would be so much less interesting. Pottery is a feral cat; it’s beautiful but it can leave scars. And if you race towards it without thinking through what you’re doing, it will slay you. I’ve been slayed. I have risen from the broken shards. And I have fallen again, humbled, and I have almost given up. But I’m still here.

Yeah, the mug takes thirty years. It absolutely does.

I did the annual studio clean-out two weeks back, and the result was that I decided to start this new pottery season slowly and intentionally, instead of leading into it with restaurant work like I’ve done the past 4 years. Mind you, there are orders I need (and want) to fill, yes indeed, but before I get to those, I want to make a few pieces that speak to me as a creator.

I decided to make a few platters to sell. I posted the first video of making the actual raw platters in this note:

Today, I’d like to show you the rest of the decoration process, which is the slip painting and carving of these platters in preparation for the first firing.

The painted platters look extremely defined as black/white, but this will become muted and mottled with the application and firing with the wood ash glaze I plan to use with these.

This is about 3 hours of work sizzled down to under five minutes.

All in, I have about 90 minutes invested to this point in each large piece from the cutting of the clay to the final sgrafitto and clean-up.

This process is slow and very centering. I find I don’t even like to have music on, especially in the summer; I just open my studio windows and listen to the background of wind and birdsong.

I have no expectations of how these will ultimately come out of the kiln. I have no control over so many parts of the process. The platters may warp and crack, although this happens very infrequently since I got my big beautiful slab roller. The glaze might hand me an unappreciated dark spot right where I don’t want one, but that’s what wood ash glaze can do - it’s a bit unpredictable.

Here’s how this glaze looks when it works out well:

All I can do is the best I can and completely let go of the outcome.

This is the philosophy that extends well beyond my pottery: embrace the process and let go of the outcome. Relieving ourselves of the burden of outcome allows us to enjoy the actual process of living so much more.

It sounds simple, but it’s not, because our entire system is created specifically to focus us ONLY on outcome, as if that’s the only reason to actually DO something.

We live in a culture where imaginary outcomes determine what we do with our entire lives. Fear guides our neuropathy, determining the rivers we’ll navigate in our minds. We limit ourselves based upon what we think or feel might be the awful outcome of taking chance and changing our process of living. What our culture gives us is a bad case of the tail wagging the dog.

Here’s the thing. Thoughts and feelings are just thoughts and feelings. They’re not real. They were never real. They go as quickly as they come, sometimes leaving hurricane-like damage in their path, sometimes disappearing without a trace. Thoughts and feelings are guided from our experience, but they’re also informed by what people/ society / religion / culture want us to think and feel.

We are living, breathing, individual, deeply vulnerable human beings traveling down a funnel into a system that profits only a few. The success of the system is completely dependent upon all of us behaving ourselves and accepting that we can’t change anything. That we’re incapable of thinking and feeling in a way that won’t lead to anxiety, fear, and simply giving up our dreams. Because that makes us predictable.

But we can opt out.

When we wrestle back the right to determine what we do - and with that what we think and feel, we push back on the fear and anxiety that controls our actions. And on the system that wants to hold us hostage.

If we do our best with the information and experience we have, decide not to turn our backs on our own potential, and let the outcome be what it will be, we get to have peace and unanticipated joy. And explosive personal growth.

I love to shoot for the stars, and believe we can manifest absolutely amazing things in our lives. In order to do that, let’s stop focusing on the end game. The outcome, whatever it is, is never what makes us happy for more than a few moments. It’s the process of living our highest potential outside of our comfort zone and challenging ourselves that delivers the joy.

We get to choose.

We never stop getting to choose.

All the what ifs and what happens whens on the planet cannot stop us from choosing.

Maybe the platters will be a shit storm. Maybe they will be gorgeous. Whatever they’ll be, I’ve loved bringing you the process of making them. So what ever happens, they were very worth making. Thank you for being part of my process. I’m grateful.