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Title: Centering in Pottery, Poetry, and the Person by Mary C. Richards, Matthew Fox ISBN: 0-8195-5190-2 Publisher: Wesleyan Univ Pr Pub. Date: April, 1989 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (4 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Life is the potter's wheel. We are the clay.
Comment: "Have you ever read CENTERING?" a friend asked me. "That book changed my life," she explained, with a knowing smile, "and I'll even loan you my copy." M. C. Richards was a potter, teacher, and poet, and her 1962 book is "a story of transformation" (p. 4). In his Foreward to the 25th Anniversay Edition of M.C.'s "truly subversive book" (p. ix), Matthew Fox writes, "I consider this book one of the great works of American philosophy: it is so cosmological, so feminist (without once using that term), so original, so full of wisdom, so post Cartesian, so nondualistic, so moral, and so fully a part of the mystical tradition of the West that one wonders from what source it arrived in our world . . . This is a prophetic and mystical book. Such books are dangerous. They are the kind dictators burn, churches tend to ignore, and consumer cultures leave on the shelf. For they have the power to awaken, to stir, to disturb, and to transform" (pp. vii-viii).
After forty years, CENTERING remains as relevant as ever. The good news is that it's still in print. M. C. observes that, in our society, "ordinary education and social training seem to impoverish the capacity for free initiative and artistic imagination. We talk indepedence, but we enact conformity . . . Brains are washed (when they are not clogged), wills are standardized, that is to say immobilized. Someone within cries for help. There must be more to life than all these learned acts, all this highly conditioned consumption. A person wants to do something of his own, to feel his own being alive and unique. He wants out of bondage. He wants in to the promised land" (p. 43).
Wisdom arrives through a childlike sense of wonder, or through "centering," as M. C. calls it. "Within us lives a merciful being," she observes, "who helps us to our feet however many times we fall" (p. 8). "Wisdom is not the product of mental effort," she tells us. Rather, it is a state of "total being, in which capacities for knowledge and for love, for survival and for death, for imagination, inspiration, intuition, for all the fabulous functioning of this human being who we are, come into a center with their forces, come into an experience of meaning that can voice itself as wise action" (p. 15). She encourages us to "ride our lives like natural beasts, like tempests, like the bounce of a ball or the slightest ambiguous hovering of ash, the drift of scent: let us stick to those currents that can carry us, membering them with our souls. Our world personifies us, we know ourselves by it" (p. 7). "I sense this," she writes; "we must be steady enough in ourselves, to be open and to let the winds of life blow through us, to be our breath, our inspiration; to breathe with them, mobile and soft in the limberness of our bodies, in our agility, our ability, as it were, to dance, and yet to stand upright, to be intact, to be persons" (p. 12). CENTERING is a "sensual, sexual, trusting" book "full of surprises" (p. xv) you'll want to share with your friends.
G. Merritt
Rating: 5
Summary: classic especially good for teachers
Comment: I've read this several times since it was first published in the 60's MC Richards has a lot of insight and some very good things to say to teachers.
Rating: 5
Summary: Written from a life centered in wisdom:
Comment: This book is a classic! I came across it in the '70's and now, again, when I am old enough to understand the depth of Mary Caroline Richard's wisdom. She truly knows what life-generating relationships are about. The best news about this book is that it is still in print.
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Title: Everyday Sacred : A Woman's Journey Home by Sue Bender ISBN: 0062512900 Publisher: Harper SanFrancisco Pub. Date: 20 September, 1996 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Technicians of Ecstasy: Shamanism and the Modern Artist by Mark Levy ISBN: 0962618446 Publisher: Bramble Co Pub. Date: September, 1993 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Creativity: Where the Divine and the Human Meet by Matthew Fox ISBN: 1585421782 Publisher: J. P. Tarcher Pub. Date: 26 September, 2002 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
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Title: The Reinvention of Work : New Vision of Livelihood for Our Time, A by Matthew Fox ISBN: 0060630620 Publisher: Harper SanFrancisco Pub. Date: 15 April, 1995 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: Owning Your Own Shadow : Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche by Robert A. Johnson ISBN: 0062507540 Publisher: Harper SanFrancisco Pub. Date: 05 March, 1993 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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