A blessing for the way you will not know me, 2024. Stoneware, 8" x 8" x 6". 

The title is taken from a line in David Whyte’s poem, “Blessing for Unrequited Love” from The Bell and the Blackbird—

“...A blessing for the way you will not know me in the years to come, and with it, a blind outstretched blessing of my hands on anything or anyone that cannot ever come to know me fully as I am, and therefore, a blessing even, for the way I will never fully know myself, above all, the deepest, kindest wishes of my own hidden and untrammeled heart for what you had to hide from me in you. Let me be generous enough and large enough to say goodbye to you without understanding, to let you go into your own understanding...”

Thinking about the idea of knowing another, or the willingness to get to know another in authentic fullness—not just in the way one already knows how to know—as the highest form of unconditional love. Then blended, but unsmoothed coils on the external surface as imposed concealment, hasty, immature, misinformed movement, attempts to express love in the only way one knows love, has been shown love.A flickering, waning light illuminates the vulnerability remaining within. 

In the context of this work the phrase, “A blessing for the way you will not know me” extends both ways—neither person will never fully know the other based on the nature of trauma, the obscuring of truth and limited understanding that comes with the overwhelming instinct to protect oneself. 

Gaps simultaneously on the verge of opening and closing, I contemplate this line of thinking—how little you know about me; how little you care to know about me/how little I wish you to know about me; how little I know about you; how little we will ever know about each other.