My Hands Saw First
For once, my brain plays the passenger prince.
Hands can’t overthink.
The endorphins from ticking tasks lists or mood boarding don’t find their way to my fingertips. All my hands can do is act. And that’s the best feature of these callused, nine inch mitts.
This “grab first, think later” motif is how ceramics became an obsession in 2021. A novel hobby for most is the craft that produces all the plates, bowls, and mugs we use daily. It’s a practice I couldn’t wrap my brain around, but gave me plenty to hold onto from jump.
I dreamt big… Early too !
VIJNs of pulling up on women I like, gifting them earthy vases and big ass bowls. Seeding them vessels for birthdays while my peers thought bottles were enough. These mitts had bigger, less thirsty plans.
They steered me to LA’s Bitter Root studio, y’all know, in front of that pink spot with the tacos.
I parked, put on an apron, and sliced a piece of wet clay. Haphazardly rolling a ball full of air pockets on this ashy communal table. Slapping this lump of clay unto the wheel gave me a rush. This child-like sensation where my brain and hands linked thru chaos.
Letting my feet get involved, the wheel spun tooooo fast and my fingers got loose…
Then the clay collapsed.
Each time this happened (plenty, every time, every day) I would grin, with all thirty one teeth out. A sensation I couldn’t place because my hands accepted a challenge my mind couldn’t back out of.
I made friends at the stu who went through the same motions. The ones who found their style in the graft of their hands and the patience of their feet. It was never that dream of vases or big ass bowls that fulfilled me.
It was trying. Failing. Then going again. Just like them.
In action, I know your hands are braver than your mind too.
We hold so tightly to this badge of being curious, we hesitate to actually start. We get to analyzing and romanticizing. Everything but actioning and completing our ideas.
Admiring craft as a watcher silently morphs into a safety mechanism stoked by endless timelines. With every scroll, we slide farther from our ability to do. As if we don’t have the sacred right to shape our physical world with the same hands so intuitively ready to move on, every three point four seconds.
Our hands only value action.
Truly acting as the best companions in trial and error, it’s like our hands have a reward system for trusting them. My gift arrived after 14 months of throwing:
These mitts demanded a bowl.
A shape with contours for my index and middle fingers.
It opened a two-year rabbit hole across the nation:
Throwing on wheels in Los Angeles. Slipcasting from garages in Charlotte, North Carolina. Finding lead-free clay bodies in a town of 800 called Seagrove before snooping on the talented people of East Fork in Asheville.
A journey that really turnt up under the 100-foot waves of Nazare, Portugal. Well, they were calm in the summer, like ten feet high when I pulled up with a close friend to visit the manufacturer behind the Nest. Product one from VIJN.
A set of bowls made for your hands.
About seven months has passed since these bowls went public. We sent them out to restaurants in Austin, retailers in the DMV, and the shape found shelf space in plenty kitchens across LA, NY, Dallas, St. Louis, Portland, and more. Mashallah.
Only DHL’s wild fees and the nuance of package design are keeping us out of Lagos, London, Dubai, and my familial home of Dakar, Senegal. For now…
What took shape with earthenware became a platform for dinners with no tables, a bevy of content, and overall, the most fulfilling project I’ve completed, to date.
On my next post inshallah, I’ll explain how I wrote this bowl shape into existence…
All these VIJNs are coming clear because my hands took action.
It’s a habit I’m building to expand my worldview and honor my courage. That’s how this thought was brought out from the depths of my Notes app to this very Substack.
We really don’t have to plan when we trust our hands to do, first.