Half Shattered Ones
Man’s most far, profoundest, star-highest issues, his prodigious powers—do not all these foam through one another in your vessel?
What wonder that many a vessel shatters! Learn to laugh at yourselves, as you well should to laugh! You of great aspiration, –Oh, how much is still possible!
And truly, how much has already succeeded! How rich is this earth in small, good, perfect things, in well-constituted things!
Place around you small, good, perfect things, to inspire your high endeavor. Their golden maturity heals the heart. The perfect teaches one to hope.
–excerpt, Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche, No. 73 The Higher Man p. 282
These lines sparked memory of a weekend spent outside of Seattle many years ago. I visited Pilchuck glass school, a community of artists who work in glass. It was early summer, and I was told the day was uncharacteristically sunny and hot for that time of year. I spent some time observing work with hot glass in one of the studios. I’d compare the atmosphere to watching a veteran 
ballet troupe dance with fire. The molten glass was very hot, and without standing close you could feel the radiant heat as the furnace door slid open, while molten glass was gathered to a blowpipe. I watched Bill Morris work. Morris worked and created with Dale Chihuly early in his career.
I remembered this morning my surprise reaction to the grassy hillsides around the studios where many pieces of failed work lay, attempts to produce vessels, improvisational efforts that failed, often in the step-down cooling stage when a crack developed. Any work, especially a great work, is controlled by the artist partially, imperfectly. And there’s no controlling of the molecular dynamic of the molten silica as it cools over many hours to room temperature.
Were the pieces of failed work throw-aways? By no means. They were a testimony to a great attempt, inspiration to stay the course, to try again.
Without any doubt, the greatest work of all is the undertaking of self-development. What I mean is our working with the raw material of genetic inheritance, and the conditioning of belonging to a certain family at a particular place and time. All of that is material one works with in order to become a mature, effective, worthy-of-respect human being. So what if one suffers a few cracks along the way. We are schooled by life.
There is much to celebrate. Can you hear the laughter?!
