Customer Reviews

Centering in Pottery, Poetry, and the Person

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Innumerable poets, potters, artists & teachers have been touched by Mary Caroline Richards. Ever attentive to the whole person, Richards shows that a truly liberating creativity arises out of compassion, an attentive stillness of soul, self-acceptance & a delight in creative "accidents." For Richards, the words "teacher" and "student" are interchangeable. She gently reminds us that she is talking about life, no matter what she seems to be saying. Richards is one of the most important teachers grown in America. If you want to know why, read "Centering."

"Have you ever read CENTERING?" a friend asked me. "That book changed my life," she explained, with a knowing smile, "and I'll even loan you my copy." M. C. Richards was a potter, teacher, and poet, and her 1962 book is "a story of transformation" (p. 4). In his Foreward to the 25th Anniversay Edition of M.C.'s "truly subversive book" (p. ix), Matthew Fox writes, "I consider this book one of the great works of American philosophy: it is so cosmological, so feminist (without once using that term), so original, so full of wisdom, so post Cartesian, so nondualistic, so moral, and so fully a part of the mystical tradition of the West that one wonders from what source it arrived in our world . . . This is a prophetic and mystical book. Such books are dangerous. They are the kind dictators burn, churches tend to ignore, and consumer cultures leave on the shelf. For they have the power to awaken, to stir, to disturb, and to transform" (pp. vii-viii).

After forty years, CENTERING remains as relevant as ever. The good news is that it's still in print. M. C. observes that, in our society, "ordinary education and social training seem to impoverish the capacity for free initiative and artistic imagination. We talk indepedence, but we enact conformity . . . Brains are washed (when they are not clogged), wills are standardized, that is to say immobilized. Someone within cries for help. There must be more to life than all these learned acts, all this highly conditioned consumption. A person wants to do something of his own, to feel his own being alive and unique. He wants out of bondage. He wants in to the promised land" (p. 43).

Wisdom arrives through a childlike sense of wonder, or through "centering," as M. C. calls it. "Within us lives a merciful being," she observes, "who helps us to our feet however many times we fall" (p. 8). "Wisdom is not the product of mental effort," she tells us. Rather, it is a state of "total being, in which capacities for knowledge and for love, for survival and for death, for imagination, inspiration, intuition, for all the fabulous functioning of this human being who we are, come into a center with their forces, come into an experience of meaning that can voice itself as wise action" (p. 15). She encourages us to "ride our lives like natural beasts, like tempests, like the bounce of a ball or the slightest ambiguous hovering of ash, the drift of scent: let us stick to those currents that can carry us, membering them with our souls. Our world personifies us, we know ourselves by it" (p. 7). "I sense this," she writes; "we must be steady enough in ourselves, to be open and to let the winds of life blow through us, to be our breath, our inspiration; to breathe with them, mobile and soft in the limberness of our bodies, in our agility, our ability, as it were, to dance, and yet to stand upright, to be intact, to be persons" (p. 12). CENTERING is a "sensual, sexual, trusting" book "full of surprises" (p. xv) you'll want to share with your friends.

G. Merritt

This book is a classic! I came across it in the '70's and now, again, when I am old enough to understand the depth of Mary Caroline Richard's wisdom. She truly knows what life-generating relationships are about. The best news about this book is that it is still in print.

Have three copies of this book-- all well worn with use.
Also have all the works published by MCR.
She has gone to the other side, but lives in the hearts here of those who love and miss her.

Within the pages of Centering you may find your "self" wandering through the back roads of your mind feeling in touch with you.

So deep the feelings found in her works.

If there is a previous review, this one will not detract from
previous comments.

I've read this several times since it was first published in the 60's MC Richards has a lot of insight and some very good things to say to teachers.

I have no comment to add on the other excellent reviews but this. Centering is a "right on time" gem. I used to wait for the new album of my favorite musician or group to gain instruction or affirmation on my life journey. I then looked to books and movies and plays to do the same. As I got older I became more of a curmudgeon; teachers were harder to find. I became aware of Centering on a fluke. I was struggling with my own slippery center. I expected to do battle with the author over finding the whole in every part. I had an attitude. I began to read the book just before I went to sleep. Little did I expect to be still reading it into the wee wee hours of the morning. Totally unexpectedly my teacher arrived, even though she is no longer breathing on the planet. Thank you MC Richards for being so honest and available and vulnerable. I can't help but underline passages, again and again.
Wayne Benenson
Seattle, WA

I'm way over 13 and it was over 30 years ago that I lost my book- Centering in Pottery, Poetry and the Person. I've been tettering ever since. Years ago this book helped me to focus on constructing my artistic talents.

Blessings

Marian Hayes

Chicago