Nikita

unthinking is the deliberate (passive?) act of not questioning a thought that you have inherited from someone else or somewhere else

Reading Paley will, I predict, make you better understand the idea that love is attention and vice versa.

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What does a writer leave behind? Scale models of a way of seeing and thinking.

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Paley’s model advises us to suffer less by loving more — love the world more, and each other more—and then she gives us a specific way to love more: see better.

The great writer’s gift to the reader are not better answers but better questions, a greater tolerance for uncertainty, a mechanism of transmuting confusion into kindness, and at the same time a way of seeing the world more clearly in order to love it more deeply.

Maria Popova

We have thoughts and they self-generate and dominate us. We mistake those thoughts for us. In both Buddhist practice and writing, you have a chance to go, Oh, those are just brain farts. They’re just happening spontaneously, and I didn’t actually create them, and I’m not sure I really want to take ownership of them. At the same time, they’re

The objects lined up in my studio are ceramics that never became finished products. Instead they have become a collection of their own, made by the traces of my past dialogues with materials used in the work progress, much like an album of memories. By looking at these objects, I can clearly see the dialogue I’ve had with my ceramics. They become

In my own work, I really appreciate when something looks like a force of nature, rather than man-made. I want it to look like it made itself.

“I think it can be a good thing to continue to mediate the old traditional techniques while simultaneously creating new traditions according to what is possible in today’s technical era. I was once told by a tea master to make sure to “deliver my work without distorting my initial expression.” 

Employing the traditional Japanese pottery technique of ishi-haze, or stone explosion, Kuwata introduces a distinctive element to his ceramic creations. Traditionally, this technique involves the addition of small stones to a glaze, which, under extreme heat and pressure of the kiln, erupts, puncturing the surface of the vessel. Kuwata, however,

Kuwata's glazing methods draw inspiration from the traditional kairagi, a form of milky white glazed Shino ware rooted in the Momoyama period (1574-1615) when the tea culture was developed. Kairagi, characterised by intentional glaze shrinkage, features a thick glaze that cracks and repels, revealing the clay body beneath. Kuwata employs kairagi to