The Potter’s Wheel (when life won’t stop shaping you)
You know that feeling when life keeps working on you, pressing into your soft spots, hollowing you out, spinning you until you’re dizzy? When you just want to stay still but everything keeps moving, keeps pushing, keeps demanding you become something other than what you feel you are?
That’s the potter’s wheel. Not some mystical “journey” of transformation, just the relentless experience of being shaped by forces you didn’t choose and can’t control.
A Potter’s Touch
On the wheel, your face disappears.
Self turns to blur.
Hands pressing in, pressing down,
the spin making you hard to read.
You feel the walls rise,
you feel them thin,
you don’t know if that’s progress
or the second before collapse.
I’ve watched my walls rise
and slump in the same breath.
One second too slow.
Hands too hungry.
And it’s just a lump again,
wet and stupid on the wheel.
Clay remembers every single thing.
Fold it wrong, it cracks in the kiln.
Trap air inside, it explodes.
The kiln finds what’s hidden
and puts it on display.
Crack or hold, you find out only
when the heat decides.
What fails gets wedged back.
Re-wetted. Beaten.
Air forced out.
Again.
Hands back on.
The glaze goes in one color,
comes out another.
You learn what the fire made of you
when the door opens.
(2021, © Julia Delaney)
What the Wheel Actually Feels Like
The potter’s wheel metaphor usually gets used to make suffering sound purposeful. Like there’s some master plan, like you’re being crafted into something specific. But most of the time, it just feels like pressure, like spinning, like hands that won’t leave you alone.
The joy that marks you – it shapes you in ways you didn’t ask for. That loss that hollowed you out – you didn’t need that space, but now it’s there, waiting to be filled with something you haven’t found yet. The pressure that feels like you’re about to crack? Maybe you are. Maybe that’s part of it.
We don’t get to be the simple lump we started as. Life won’t let us. It keeps pressing, pulling, shaping. Sometimes gentle, often not. And we either collapse under it or learn to move with it – not because we’re wise or evolved, but because resisting makes it worse.
The thing about clay is it has no choice but to become what the hands make it. But somehow, in the becoming, something happens. You develop the ability to hold things. To carry what needs carrying. To be useful in ways you couldn’t be when you were just potential.
Those cracks that got mended? They’re still visible.
Those places where you almost broke? They’re part of the structure now.
You’re not smooth or perfect or what anyone planned, you’re just shaped. By everything that happened, by all the hands that touched you (gentle or harsh).
That’s not inspiring, it’s just what happens when you exist long enough. You become a vessel shaped by experience, whether you wanted to be shaped or not…
You become something that can hold both damage and light, something useful, something that survived the fire and came out different, not better, but capable of containing things.
That’s all. You’re clay that’s been through it. Still here, still spinning, still being shaped by hands you can’t see and didn’t invite.
Be Alive 🌱
Love ❤️, Julia
![[section label="Regret, You Silent Sculptor"] [row style="small" v_align="equal" h_align="center"] [col span="7" span__sm="12" span__md="6" animate="blurIn"] Grooves Regret works in the dark. Chisel and mallet, carving valleys in my chest, grooves in my mind, hollows I didn't know were there until I fall into them. It shapes with "what if," with "if only," with the door I didn't walk through, the call that went to voicemail, the words that sat in my throat and stayed there. It keeps reworking my memories, pressing new grooves over old, until I can't tell anymore which version I lived and which one it made. The groove gets deeper. The chisel returns to the same line. I feel it wearing through and I hold still for it like I'm helping. But my hands are moving too. On different clay. Something regret hasn't touched yet. Two sculptors. Same room. One facing what was. One facing what's here. Neither puts down their tools. [gap height="10px"] [ux_text font_size="0.75" text_align="left"] (2018, © Julia Delaney) [/ux_text] [/col] [col span="5" span__sm="12" span__md="6"] [ux_image id="27223" image_hover="glow" depth="1" animate="blurIn"] [/col] [/row] [/section] The past is already carved. What matters is who's holding the chisel now... Be Alive 🌱 Love ❤️, Julia [section bg="24103" divider_top="waves-opacity" divider_top_flip="0" divider_top_to_front="0" divider="waves-opacity" divider_flip="0"] [ux_text text_align="center"] more from this hour: [/ux_text] [gap] [blog_posts style="default" type="row" col_spacing="xsmall" columns="3" columns__md="1" depth_hover="5" animate="blurIn" ids="27202,8949,27229" show_date="false" excerpt="false" comments="false" image_height="56.25%" image_hover="glow" image_hover_alt="zoom"] [/section] [block id= "poetry"] [block id="disclaimer"]](https://eadn-wc05-15915244.nxedge.io/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/poetry-about-life-711x400.jpg)
Rhyme & Reason
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