The Useful Senseless, Useless Stuff

Good evening! or is it Good morning? That will still depend on when I will be able to click that magical blue button with "Publish" written on it. This thought (if I can deliver it well) has traveled (comes in and vapors out on loop) and lingered a long time in my head. It was in my head for a few weeks now. I keep flipping it in my head and so it stayed there flipping. Its last flip-scapade finally landed it on Read's Write Article after reading Bloghound's pottery escapade. But then ends in Save as Draft with just the "good morning" written.

And right now, I have been battling with capturing my thoughts and writing it down. I've already let Mariah Carey finish Angels Cry, and had the version with Neyo on it finished next, then Craig David's I Just Don't Love You No More and the last song that I will allow to distract me from writing this one down is LeAnn Rimes' Insensitive. So yes, I am dilly-dallying and blabbering and typing away anything I can think of that I will most likely delete after I have settled my caffeine-deprived brain.  pulls back the slider on LeAnn Rimes' song back to the beginning.

And before I continue my blabbering.. do check out these wonderful people. Their 
support and works are a package of inspiration to me. Read them and be inspired as well!

At least, I got you smashing things even just by wishing and imagining trying it yourselves in the previous article.

And would you look at that pile of broken and smashed items :

Now I am not sure what they do with all those broken pieces. I never thought of asking until I got to typing this part. But my big guess is that they will be telling me that they put it in the trash.

Whenever you break glasses, plates, etcetera, what do you usually do with the pieces?

If it is a mug and there are no sharp edges that might cut our lips, we still try to use it, right?

If it is a plate, a bowl or a vase, once shattered, we would probably put them in the trash. They are, after all, useless. And it is weird and senseless to keep it.

In some pottery shops and studios, though, they keep old, broken clay jars. These old, useless things are ground up and refined to powder. This is what they call "grog". These can also be the rejects or the quote and quote factory defects that they grind eventually.

What are these for? Why keep it?

Potters start their craft by preparing their clays. They do not just throw it to the wheel or start molding the moment they get their clay package. These clays undergo wedging. Wedging removes air bubbles from the clay. Not removing these air bubbles will have an effect on the product when it starts its drying process or when heat is already applied to it. These bubbles are suspected to be an agent to the cracking of the product during its drying or firing stage.

After wedging the clay, the potters proceed to shaping it whether using a wheel or manually molding by hand. Then some air dry it or they use kiln or some furnace for firing. In firing, or putting the molded clay to bake at a certain high temperature, it puts the material to its final "strong" state.

So the usual process goes : Wedging, Shaping, Drying (some stops here), Firing (others go this extent) and Glazing ( again some).

Depending on the clay, there are three things that can happen during the drying and/or firing stage. The molded clay can:

• Shrink

• Crack

• be the beautiful product

The Role of the Grog

So where does the grog come in? Now when grogs are mixed in to the clay, these senseless, useless, old, unsightly, unbearable rejects helps to reduce shrinkage and cracking of the product during drying or during firing.

What's more, these items help the product to endure higher temperatures making the final product stronger than the one made of plain clay.

Now Let Us TRAVEL BACK to where we screamed "Tacsiyapo"!

Maybe we have not physically been to that wonderful place to shatter and smash all our angers and frustrations away. But we can imagine us screaming, picking up the item to throw and then throwing it to the wall, hearing it get smashed and crushed and then watch it fall on the dirt pile.

Maybe, also, we have pictured ourselves the ones getting thrown, getting smashed through the wall and falling on the dirt pile - in pieces.

Maybe it is in the past. Something that you would rather not talk about. Something senseless, useless, old that we keep rejecting.

These are our grogs.

Senseless, useless, old, unsightly, unbearable, unbelievably painful experiences, feelings, thoughts.

These grogs helps us endure higher temperatures making us stronger than when we were plain clays that shrinks and cracks easily during uneasy times.

There was a quote in one of the pictures of Bloghound's writeup from Lupita Nyong'o : Clay can be dirt in the wrong hands but clay can be art in the RIGHT HANDS.

Goodnight :D

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Romans 8:28