Looking In

More thoughts on how to make the most of autumn

This is a pottery piece that my brothers and I gave to my father on the occasion of his retirement from teaching. He saw it in a gallery and admired it and talked about it, clearly desperate to own it, so a few days later, when I was alone, I nipped in and got it before anyone else could, and hid it away. Not long afterwards, at last resolved, he went back to the gallery to reserve it for himself, only to be told by the gallery owner (who was in cahoots with me) that it had already been sold “to a Japanese businessman”. He was crestfallen.

Well, imagine my father’s amazement and delight when, a few weeks later, sitting at the head of the table after the retirement dinner we threw for him, unwrapping a big box, he discovered that it contained the bowl he’d given up hope ever of owning. “Wow! How did you do this?” he exclaimed.

The handmade piece is about a foot and a quarter in diameter. Its outside is unglazed clay, its inside a glossy, inky shade — half night sky, half deep waters — around which sit three quiet figures, also in unglazed clay, focussed inwards. “One for each of my children,” he said at the time. He placed it on a wooden chest — once belonging to his great-grandmother, later his toy box, now used as a side table — where the bowl still sits, miraculously undemolished by his grandchildren, next to his favourite chair. The piece is called, “Looking Inwards.”

And so I begin here this week, since turning inwards is what the mind and the body seem naturally to do once the wind and rain start ruthlessly flinging their weight around, stripping the outside world of colour and light, as if tearing down the set of a show whose last curtain has fallen. Now comes the time to search for colour and light within.