There are currently numerous experimental clay mugs without handles crowding my room, some stacked cracked “failures” I can’t yet find a use for, or bury in a garden .. simply because the process of creating them all was intermingled mindful/mindlessness. I savor the “out of my mind” time I was gifted in molding them, in feeling the squishy, wet forgiveness of clay.

For the past year I have continually thrust small hardened “tree hangers or backpack tags“ upon friends and strangers. They show up now on many shores, stamped with  “Bless Up”, “Live Love”, “Om”, “Peace”, “Epic”, “Give”, “Let it go”, “Be Kind”, “Breathe”, “Liminality” etc. Words hanging in random places where one can subtlety spot them.

It is a priceless choice when one is invited into a subtle shift of more consciousness without pressure. A spontaneously enlightened choice. In the privacy of one’s alone moment with a word, (be it on a mug, a pill holder, a non nameable piece) that was created because the mind was blankly wandering, while hands kept moving till a subconscious synchronized force signaled the stall of that creation.

A recent show of the potter Rick Dillingham in Santa Fe (who unfortunately died young at age 41 from AIDS), entitled “to make, unmake, and make again”  was a clear message for me that broken vessels, like wrecked fragile lives and souls, can indeed be rebuilt. 

My “modern elder” life continually demonstrates how one can remold … staying pliable and forgiving as we accept physical restrictions. In the face of destruction and changes in life (as we knew it), there is hope to infuse our souls with light and beauty, moving forward in continual exciting self discovery.

I love that being out of my head allows submersion in sensual play, in sometimes creating the most practical of pieces and at other times simply creating “WTF”? How freeing that I do not have to understand or make sense of a form! 

Now, more than 60 years after playing dinky toys in elaborate mud tracks and tunnels, under a shady mango tree at my grandparents home in Jamaica, I’m greatly appreciating tasting/experiencing life again in a tactile “time machine.”

And like the child that was .. present in non judgmental compassion for Self.

Mold Unmold Remold.

-Cookie

From a barefoot childhood in Jamaica, to her first official paying job as photographer for the first Bob Marley and the Wailers album, to capturing Chris Blackwell’s Island Outpost Hotels, Cookie Kinkead is currently sharing “elder space” with Chip, her friend of 35 years, creating MEA’s visual library of images.