Four years ago, when I started this adventure in self-employment. I realized in my first year that traveling was not in my cards. I love seeing new people and experiencing new events, but pottery is heavy and my car is small. I once had a fellow vendor who was watching me unload. That my car must be a clown car because of how much stuff I was taking out. Just a side note, I have a Kia Soul, which I love. The car can handle a load of just about 850 lbs. I factor this in whenever I have to transport clay, but not when I travel to festivals. I sort of just cross my fingers and hope I am in the correct bearing weight. Thus, my wholesale dream was created.

My best friend gifted me with a book bundle titled “What You Do Matters” by. Yamada. The first book in the anthology is titled “What do you do with an idea?”. About a little boy who had this idea but had no notion what to do with it, and thus chose to ignore it, but luckily, the idea followed him. By the end of the book, after a bit of a journey, the idea grows into something beautiful that people loved. The little boy, no longer filled with doubt, saw the idea take wings and fly away to change the world.

That is how my wholesale idea felt. I had this idea, but it needed to follow me around for a little while. I needed to bundle it up on rainy days and feed it chicken soup. I had to carry it over the stormy seas of my own self-doubt. Until a few years ago, when someone asked me to make them soup dishes. A small thing, simple, and something I was fully capable of completing. Over the years, she started to order other items from me, mugs and planters. People loved them, and then I was in Portland at the Oregon Potters Association Showcase, and another person wanted to carry my planters.

Self-confidence takes some time. People are filled with self-doubt, but bundle them up on rainy days and feed them chicken soup, and before you know it, that self-doubt is gone, and with it comes confidence or enough confidence to slowly branch out a little more. Which brings me to my Positioning Statement that is waiting for me to write on a different tab, and self-doubt once more floods over me. Can I write this? Am I capable of writing this? What do I want to say?

Perhaps I’ll bundle it up for the moment and go make some chicken soup.

I’ve yet to make my morning coffee. Rue gets me out of bed promptly at 8 am or before. His stomach has an inner clock system for food. I am sitting in my dining room, looking into the living room where the folding table, legs now fully extended and upright, has my unfinished work from yesterday, which is still under the large, roughly cut plastic. I remember this particular piece of plastic and how I acquired it. I was walking a few years ago, when I worked for a promotional company. I took walks most days because office work was not for me. This plastic had been floating in the wind; originally, I assumed it came from the concrete block retailer across the street. I could see right away that it was thick and heavy. Perfect for keeping out airflow that would otherwise dry out my unsculpted pots. Only now do I wonder if I should ask them if they have more. I believe they receive it all the time with every shipment of new garden blocks, which is why it is so thick; those blocks are heavy and would require thicker plastic than normal to hold them on their pallets.

Some day are hard to deal with. I know that I am suppose to be working in the studio, but there is also the house to handle. I make myself a list every morning of items I want to complete. So far I have thrown twenty mugs and nothing else. I aspire to sculpt platners. I will sculpt planter before the end of the night.

The main distraction of the day was a new computer. I had to invest in a new/refurbished one because mine was far too old and struggled to perform the simplest plist of task. Even as I write this I am finding out new and improved aspect of this computer.