Holding Nothing

We are on holiday on the Outer Hebrides island of Harris. Now the admission. It has many small studios where local painters and potters display their work but I usually avoid going into them because I’m very picky and I find it impossible to say something appreciative if in fact I don’t feel it. I experience it as condescending and embarrassing. So you get the picture. Now yesterday, as we paused to look at the map, Philippa popped out of the car to look at a gallery by the side of the road. I stayed in the car. However, she came back almost immediately and said you must look at this - so, I did.

Now some back story. I’ve been learning to throw pots on the wheel. I read you need to throw a hundred cylinders before you do anything else. I've thrown about thirty-eight so far. Each one I immediately cut vertically in half to assess its faults and successes. As I said I‘m picky and I want to learn how to do it well. Where this is going is that I have begun to realise through this repetition that throwing a pot is a lot to do with how I am in myself. If I am not still the pot will not centre. Still myself and the pot follows. Add unnecessary emotion to the process - frustration, ambition, pushy intentionality - and it instantly goes wrong. Throwing a pot is a mirror of my mind.

Back to Harris. Entering the gallery I was confronted by a case of open shelves holding Japanese style tea cups. Generally these are called Yunomi which means ‘hot water, drinking’ and are the traditional vessel for drinking green tea that goes back for centuries. They have a small ‘foot’, no handle and so must be cradled in the hands. They invite savouring and not gulping. Though a household object they are also much valued and some in themselves are viewed as great master pieces. Personally I think they are things of beauty and it was with these in mind, wanting to be able to make them, (or something like them), that I started learning to pot.

What made this collection of Yunomi so special was that, while each of the thirty or so pots was completely individual, they were all living entities. To steal a Zen phrase, they were all just sitting. Resting naturally in themselves. Actually, I’m beginning to struggle here because describing them so you can imagine what I’m talking about is turning out to be rather hard. If you were to look them up to get a visual impression it probably wouldn’t be quite right. What you will probably see will be too finished, too glossy, too perfect. What this potter has created - his name is Nickolai Globe - is something much rougher, the rim not entirely smooth, the foot only rudimentarily formed, finger prints left from dipping in the glaze. It’s as if he is not actually interested in making a cup to drink out of but rather each cup is moment of being, an expression of the emptiness within it, a display of the space in which it sits. The making of each becoming an act of non-meditation that desires to go no where else. A place that spontaneously happens when wanting and not wanting cease. Or something like that!

While I was looking at them the potter came out and started talking about their making. He confirmed what I had guessed from picking them up and holding them. Without being precious they were a meditation in action - my phrase, not his. To make them he had to get out of the way. Intentionality killed them dead. Emptiness left unimpeded expresses itself. Was he a Buddhist or knew of non-dual Buddhist ideas? I have no idea but it's a wonderful thing to see buddha-nature displaying itself with such delight in a small converted chapel hidden away within the moon like landscape of Southern Harris. What a treat!

Mid-summer on Harris

I dream of my Yunomi tea cup

Or maybe it dreams me.

NW. 9 June 2026

Nickolai Globe 

https://www.themissionhouse.co.uk

PS. Philippa did buy one.