Pottery Life Quotes

I want my life to be like-like making pottery. I want to enjoy it while it's happening, not just for where it might get me eventually.

In the east," she says after a time, her gaze still downcast, "there is a tradition known as kintsukuroi. It is the practice of mending broken ceramic pottery using lacquer dusted with gold and silver and other precious metals. It is meant to symbolize that things can be more beautiful for having been broken." "Why are you telling me this?" I ask. At last she looks at me. Her irises are polished obsidian in the moonlight. "Because I want you to know," she says, "that there is life after survival.

You don't hear heroes say that a lot. Quick, Boy Wonder! To the pottery studio! But Alex's tone left no doubt it was a matter of life and death.

To all the secret writers, late-night painters, would-be singers, lapsed and scared artists of every stripe, dig out your paintbrush, or your flute, or your dancing shoes. Pull out your camera or your computer or your pottery wheel. Today, tonight, after the kids are in bed or when your homework is done, or instead of one more video game or magazine, create something, anything. Pick up a needle and thread, and stitch together something particular and honest and beautiful, because we need it. I need it. Thank you, and keep going.

That a thing made by hand, the work and thought of a single craftsman, can endure much longer than its maker, through centuries in fact, can survive natural catastrophe, neglect, and even mistreatment, has always filled me with wonder. Sometimes in museums, looking at a humble piece of pottery from ancient Persia or Pompeii, or a finely wrought page from a medieval illuminated manuscript toiled over by a nameless monk, or a primitive tool with a carved handle, I am moved to tears. The unknown life of the maker is evanescent in its brevity, but the work of his or her hands and heart remains.

i'm going for, like, depressed lesbian poet who met a hot yoga instructor at a speakeasy who got her super into meditation and pottery, and now she's starting a new life as a high-powered businesswoman selling her own line of hand-thrown fruit bowls

Then they have the audacity to go shopping and pick out their own gifts. I want to know who the first person was who said this was okay. After spending all that money on a bachelorette weekend, a shower, and often a flight across the country, they expect you to go to Williams Sonoma or Pottery Barn and do research? Then they send you a thank-you note applauding you for such a thoughtful gift. They're the one who picked it out!

In practicing the Japanese art of Kintsukuroi, one repairs broken pottery by filling in the cracks with gold, silver, or platinum. The choice to highlight the breaks with precious metals not only acknowledges them, but also pays tribute to the vessel that has been torn apart by the mutability of life. The previously broken object is considered more beautiful for its imperfections. In life, too, even greater brilliance can be found after mending.

A kind man once told me that in Japan, broken pottery is pieced back together using gold as the glue, highlighting the cracks, making them beautiful. And maybe that could be my heart—hurt and healed, but filled with gold because I’d known Kyle.

Up at Meru I saw a young Native girl with a bracelet on, a leather strap two inches wide, and embroidered all over with very small turquoise-coloured beads which varied a little in colour and played in green, light blue, and ultramarine. It was an extraordinarily live thing; it seemed to draw breath on her arm, so that I wanted it for myself, and made Farah buy it from her. No sooner had it come upon my own arm than it gave up the ghost. It was nothing now, a small, cheap, purchased article of finery. It had been the play of colours, the duet between the turquoise and the 'nègre' - that quick, sweet, brownish black, like peat and black pottery, of the Native's skin - that had created the life of the bracelet.

My hands are upon his face, mirror to the spot where I’ll carry red, puckered scars for the rest of my life. In his gaze, they seem to matter less. We are not broken things, neither of us. We are cracked pottery mended with lacquer and flakes of gold, whole as we are, complete unto each other. Complete and worthy and so very loved.

I want my life to be like—like making pottery. I want to enjoy it while it’s happening, not just for where it might get me eventually.

Life has little bits of magic at nearly every turn, if you're looking closely enough. Scrapbooking has refined myselses. it's made me hungry to use it before I lose it. It's made me remember that I don't remember what it was like to be nine years old. And that I will never live in a Pottery Barn house. And that as tiny as I am in the scope of the universe, no one lives a life like mine. Not even the people whose meals I cook, whose laundry I fold, and whose cheeks I kiss at night.

The Fae book was definitely filled with the same stories as hers, but this one was filled with picture after picture of Jared. She couldn’t help but flip backward a few pages and see magical images come to life: of Jared defending her in an alley. Sitting in art class with Mina, spinning on the pottery wheel. There was another one of Jared by the lake, teaching her to fight. Jared and her in the storage room, laughing, before their tickling fight. She flipped forward and saw the last page filled with a motion-captured image of Jared and her sharing a kiss.

Kintsugi is a Japanese art, that takes broken pottery and delicately places it back together by sealing the cracks with gold lacquer. I found myself admiring the metaphor it represents. It reminded me of you. Maybe you feel like you are broken inside, maybe you’re worried that you will disappoint me. Just like this pottery, life will never be perfect, but it can be beautiful. But we have to choose to see the beauty of it, not despite it’s cracks or imperfections but because of it. I get that you may not want to show me the side of you that’s less than perfect, but don’t you see? I don’t want perfect. Perfect is overrated. All I want is you. All that you are. Exactly as you are. I want you to know that I will wait for you, for as long as it takes. Take your time. (but not too long)

Whether it’s pottery or life, it takes more than one attempt for them to come out right. And all that effort makes the end product more valuable, too.

I decided I would put off the novel until I had gone to Europe and had a lover, and that I would never learn a word of shorthand. If I never learned shorthand I would never have to use it. I thought I would spend the summer reading "Finnegan's Wake" and writing my thesis. Then I would be way ahead when college started at the end of September, and able to enjoy my last year instead of swotting away with no make up and stringy hair, on a diet of Benzedrine, the way most of the seniors taking honors did, until they finished their thesis. Then I thought I might put off college for a year and apprentice myself to a pottery maker. Or work my way to Germany and be a waitress, until I was bilingual. Then plan after plan started leaping through my head, like a family of scatty rabbits. I saw the years of my life spaced along a road in the form of telephone poles, threaded together by the wires. I counted one, two, three.... nineteen telephone poles dangled in space, and try as I would, I couldn't see a single pole beyond the nineteenth.

You just need to make them again, and again. That's why I'm not bothered when my pieces crack or break. Because I'm going to keep on making more. Whether it's pottery or life, it takes more than one attempt for them to come out right. And all that effort makes the end product more valuable, too.

It's not the concept of marriage I have a problem with. I'd like to get married too. A couple times. It's the actual wedding that pisses me off. The problem is that everyone who gets married seems to think that they are the first person in the entire universe to do it, and that the year leading up to the event revolves entirely around them. You have to throw them showers, bachelorette weekends, buy a bridesmaid dress, and then buy a ticket to some godforsaken town wherever they decide to drag you. If you're really unlucky, they'll ask you to recite a poem at their wedding. That's just what I want to do- monitor my drinking until I'm done with my public service announcement. And what do we get out of it, you ask? A dry piece of chicken and a roll in the hay with their hillbilly cousin. I could get that at home, thanks. Then they have the audacity to go shopping and pick out their own gifts. I want to know who the first person was who said this was okay. After spending all that money on a bachelorette weekend, a shower, and often a flight across the country, they expect you to go to Williams Sonoma or Pottery Barn and do research? Then they send you a thank-you note applauding you for such a thoughtful gift. They're the one who picked it out! I always want to remind the person that absolutely no thought went into typing in a name and having a salad bowl come up.

But God is never limited by our limitations. In fact, he enjoys putting his great power into ordinary containers. The Bible says, “We are like clay jars in which this treasure is stored. The real power comes from God and not from us.”5 Like common pottery, we are fragile and flawed and break easily.

But I knew I wanted to be with him, and he wanted to be with me, too, and also knew what he wanted to do with his life. So, we compromised. He took the job in Des Moines, and it was my responsibility to get a job that would make enough money for what we needed, and that I enjoyed enough. I didn’t have to love it, but it didn’t matter whether I did, either, because I had him. I kept trying new things, too, and eventually discovered pottery. It’s fun, of course, but the most important part is that I didn’t feel like my job had to be my everything.” This is what I have to keep reminding myself. Sometimes a job can just be a job. We aren’t all going to win the rat race. “I know.

I’m mesmerized by lipstick prints on coffee cups. By the lines of lips against white pottery. By the color chosen by the woman who sat and sipped and lived life. By the mark she leaves behind. Some people read tea leaves and others can tell your future through the lines on your palm. I think I’d like to read lipstick marks on coffee mugs. To learn how to differentiate yearning from satiation. To know the curve of a deep-rooted joy or the line of bottomless grief. To be able to say, this deep blue red you chose and how firmly you planted your lips, this speaks of love on the horizon. But, darling, you must be sure to stand in your own truth. That barely-there nude that circles the entire rim? You are exploding into lightness and possibilities beyond what you currently know. The way the gloss only shows when the light hits it and the coffee has sloshed all over the saucer? people need to take the time to see you whole but my god, you’re glorious and messy and wonderful and free. The deep purple bruise almost etched in a single spot and most of the cup left unconsumed? Oh love. Let me hold the depth of your ache. It is true. He’s not coming back. I know you already know this, but do you also know this is not the end? Love. This is not the end. I imagine that I can know entire stories by these marks on discarded mugs. Imagine that I know something intimate and true of the woman who left them. That I could take those mugs home one day and an entire novel worth of characters would pour out, just like that.

In the specially Christian case we have to react against the heavy bias of fatigue. It is almost impossible to make the facts vivid, because the facts are familiar; and for fallen men it is often true that familiarity is fatigue. I am convinced that if we could tell the supernatural story of Christ word for word as of a Chinese hero, call him the Son of Heaven instead of the Son of God, and trace his rayed nimbus in the gold thread of Chinese embroideries or the gold lacquer of Chinese pottery, instead of in the gold leaf of our own old Catholic paintings, there would be a unanimous testimony to the spiritual purity of the story. We should hear nothing then of the injustice of substitution or the illogicality of atonement, of the superstitious exaggeration of the burden of sin or the impossible insolence of an invasion of the laws of nature. We should admire the chivalry of the Chinese conception of a god who fell from the sky to fight the dragons and save the wicked from being devoured by their own fault and folly. We should admire the subtlety of the Chinese view of life, which perceives that all human imperfection is in very truth a crying imperfection. We should admire the Chinese esoteric and superior wisdom, which said there are higher cosmic laws than the laws we know.

The stream and the broken pottery: what was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself,—life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose? The Indian women had held it in their jars. In the sculpture she had seen in the Art Institute, it had been caught in a flash of arrested motion. In singing, one made a vessel of one's throat and nostrils and held it on one's breath, caught the stream in a scale of natural intervals. IV

the more interesting their conversation, the more cultured they are, the more they will be trapped into thinking that they are effective at what they are doing in real business (something psychologists call the halo effect, the mistake of thinking that skills in, say, skiing translate unfailingly into skills in managing a pottery workshop or a bank department, or that a good chess player would be a good strategist in real life).

Marrying cousins was astoundingly common into the nineteenth century, and nowhere is this better illustrated than with the Darwins and their cousins the Wedgwoods (of pottery fame). Charles married his first cousin Emma Wedgwood, daughter of his beloved Uncle Josiah. Darwin's sister Caroline, meanwhile, married Josiah Wedgwood III, Emma's brother and the Darwin siblings' joint first cousin. Another of Emma's brothers, Henry, married not a Darwin but a first cousin from another branch of his own Wedgwood family, adding another strand to the family's wondrously convoluted genetics. Finally, Charles Langton, who was not related to either family, first married Charlotte Wedgwood, another daughter of Josiah and cousin of Charles, and then upon Charlotte's death married Darwin's sister Emily, thus becoming, it seems, his sister-in-law's sister-in-law's husband and raising the possibility that any children of the union would be their own first cousins.

Centering, however, is easier said than done. This I learned from a ceramics class I once took. The teacher made throwing a pot look easy, but the thing is, it takes lots of precision and skill. You slam the ball of clay down in the absolute center of the pottery wheel, and with steady hands you push your thumb into the middle of it, spreading it wider a fraction of an inch at a time. But every single time I tried to do it, I only got so far before my pot warped out of balance, and every attempt to fix it just made it worse, until the lip shredded, the sides collapsed, and I was left with what the teacher called “a mystery ashtray,” which got hurled back into the clay bucket. So what happens when your universe begins to get off balance, and you don’t have any experience with bringing it back to center? All you can do is fight a losing battle, waiting for those walls to collapse, and your life to become one huge mystery ashtray.

Later in life the force of abstinence was to really be understood and my parent's problems became very clear. When will man appreciate his pleasures and respect them enough to indulge in moderation?

How is Life Full of Choices? When we eat too much, we make a choice to be overweight. When we drink too much, we make a choice to have a headache the next day. If we drink and drive, we choose to risk being killed or killing someone in an accident. When we ill-treat people, we choose to be ill-treated in return. When we don’t care about other people, we choose not to be cared for by them. When we light up a cigarette, we choose to invite cancer. Choices have consequences. The most important thing to understand is that we are all free to the point of making choices. but, after we make a choice, the choice controls the chooser. We have no more choices. What is success? Series of positive choices is called success and series of negative choices is called failure. We have an equal opportunity to be unequal. The choice is ours. Life can be compared to a pottery maker who shapes clay in any form he wants. Similarly we can mould our lives into any shape we want.

Forever, Tom thought. Maybe he’d never go back to the States. It was not so much Europe itself as the evenings he had spent alone, here and in Rome, that made him feel that way. Evenings by himself simply looking at maps, or lying around on sofas thumbing through guidebooks. Evenings looking at his clothes - his clothes and Dickie’s - and feeling Dickie’s rings between his palms, and running his fingers over the antelope suitcase he had bought at Gucci’s. He had polished the suitcase with a special English leather dressing, not that it needed polishing because he took such good care of it, but for its protection. He loved possessions, not masses of them, but a select few that he did not part with. They gave a man self-respect. Not ostentation but quality, and the love that cherished the quality. Possessions reminded him that he existed, and made him enjoy his existence. It was as simple as that. And wasn’t that worth something? He existed. Not many people in the world knew how to, even if they had the money. It really didn’t take money, masses of money, it took a certain security. He had been on the road to it, even with Marc Priminger. He had appreciated Marc’s possessions, and they were what had attracted him to the house, but they were not his own, and it had been impossible to make a beginning at acquiring anything of his own on forty dollars a week. It would have taken him the best years of his life, even if he had economised stringently, to buy the things he wanted. Dickie’s money had given him only an added momentum on the road he had been travelling. The money gave him the leisure to see Greece, to collect Etruscan pottery if he wanted (he had recently read an interesting book on that subject by an American living in Rome), to join art societies if he cared to and to donate to their work. It gave him the leisure, for instance, to read his Malraux tonight as late as he pleased, because he did not have to go to a job in the morning. He had just bought a two-volume edition of Malraux’s Psychologic de I’art which he was now reading, with great pleasure, in French with the aid of a dictionary.

i’m going for, like, depressed lesbian poet who met a hot yoga instructor at a speakeasy who got her super into meditation and pottery, and now she’s starting a new life as a high-powered businesswoman selling her own line of hand-thrown fruit bowls … HRH Prince Dickhead Bitch, you took me there.

I have never found a solo life is devastated.At times it is lonely.It is a selfish life doing only the things you want to do. That is what the general public are jealous of but are not prepared to take the loneliness to reap the excitement that only solos can accept without having to consider others.

Life appears to have been pretty good for the Skara Brae residents. They had jewelry and pottery. They grew wheat and barley, and enjoyed bounteous harvests of shellfish and fish, including a codfish that weighed seventy-five pounds. They kept cattle, sheep, pigs, and dogs. The one thing they lacked was wood.

In Japanese culture there is an art of fixing broken pottery with gold or silver lacquer. The lacquer highlights the pottery’s flaw as a celebrated part of its history. Because the piece has been salvaged and repaired, pulled back from the edge of destruction, it is considered even more beautiful for having been broken. We’d been broken. And then we’d been pieced back together. The turmoil had been meaningful because now there was gold where the cracks used to be.

I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had. Some people’s emanations are very strong, some people create themselves afresh outside of their own body. This is not fancy. If a potter has an idea, she makes it into a pot, and it exists beyond her, in its own separate life. She uses a physical substance to display her thoughts. If I use a metaphysical substance to display my thoughts, I might be anywhere at one time, influencing a number of different things, just as the potter and her pottery can exert influence in different places. There’s a chance that I’m not here at all, that all the parts of me, running along all the choices I did and didn’t make, for a moment brush against each other. That I am still an evangelist in the North, as well as the person who ran away. Perhaps for a while these two selves have become confused. I have not gone forward or back in time, but across in time, to something I might have been, playing itself out.

His face goes shy, eyes flitting down, then back up to mine. "Yes, Monty," he says, and he smiles on my name. "I love you. And I want to be with you." "And you, Percy," I return, touching my nose to his, "are the great love of my life. Whatever happens from here, I hope that's the one thing that never changes." My hands are upon his face, mirror to the spot where I'll carry red, puckered scars for the rest of my life. In his gaze, they seem to matter less. We are not broken things, neither of us. We are cracked pottery mended with lacquer and flakes of gold, whole as we are, complete unto each other. Complete and worthy and so very loved. "May I kiss you?" I ask. "Abso-bloody-lutely you may," he says. And so I do.

The Enchanted Broccoli Forest. Oh, what a pleasure that was! Mollie Katzen's handwritten and illustrated recipes that recalled some glorious time in upstate New York when a girl with an appetite could work at a funky vegetarian restaurant and jot down some tasty favorites between shifts. That one had the Pumpkin Tureen soup that Margo had made so many times when she first got the book. She loved the cheesy onion soup served from a pumpkin with a hot dash of horseradish and rye croutons. And the Cardamom Coffee Cake, full of butter, real vanilla, and rich brown sugar, said to be a favorite at the restaurant, where Margo loved to imagine the patrons picking up extras to take back to their green, grassy, shady farmhouses dotted along winding country roads. Linda's Kitchen by Linda McCartney, Paul's first wife, the vegetarian cookbook that had initially spurred her yearlong attempt at vegetarianism (with cheese and eggs, thank you very much) right after college. Margo used to have to drag Calvin into such phases and had finally lured him in by saying that surely anything Paul would eat was good enough for them. Because of Linda's Kitchen, Margo had dived into the world of textured vegetable protein instead of meat, and tons of soups, including a very good watercress, which she never would have tried without Linda's inspiration. It had also inspired her to get a gorgeous, long marble-topped island for prep work. Sometimes she only cooked for the aesthetic pleasure of the gleaming marble topped with rustic pottery containing bright fresh veggies, chopped to perfection. Then Bistro Cooking by Patricia Wells caught her eye, and she took it down. Some pages were stuck together from previous cooking nights, but the one she turned to, the most splattered of all, was the one for Onion Soup au Gratin, the recipe that had taught her the importance of cheese quality. No mozzarella or broken string cheeses with- maybe- a little lacy Swiss thrown on. And definitely none of the "fat-free" cheese that she'd tried in order to give Calvin a rich dish without the cholesterol. No, for this to be great, you needed a good, aged, nutty Gruyère from what you couldn't help but imagine as the green grassy Alps of Switzerland, where the cows grazed lazily under a cheerful children's-book blue sky with puffy white clouds. Good Gruyère was blocked into rind-covered rounds and aged in caves before being shipped fresh to the USA with a whisper of fairy-tale clouds still lingering over it. There was a cheese shop downtown that sold the best she'd ever had. She'd tried it one afternoon when she was avoiding returning home. A spunky girl in a visor and an apron had perked up as she walked by the counter, saying, "Cheese can change your life!" The charm of her youthful innocence would have been enough to be cheered by, but the sample she handed out really did it. The taste was beyond delicious. It was good alone, but it cried out for ham or turkey or a rich beefy broth with deep caramelized onions for soup.

People who don’t read science fiction, but who have at least given it a fair shot, often say they’ve found it inhuman, elitist, and escapist. Since its characters, they say, are both conventionalized and extraordinary, all geniuses, space heroes, superhackers, androgynous aliens, it evades what ordinary people really have to deal with in life, and so fails an essential function of fiction. However remote Jane Austen’s England is, the people in it are immediately relevant and revelatory—reading about them we learn about ourselves. Has science fiction anything to offer but escape from ourselves? The cardboard-character syndrome was largely true of early science fiction, but for decades writers have been using the form to explore character and human relationships. I’m one of them. An imagined setting may be the most appropriate in which to work out certain traits and destinies. But it’s also true that a great deal of contemporary fiction isn’t a fiction of character. This end of the century isn’t an age of individuality as the Elizabethan and the Victorian ages were. Our stories, realistic or otherwise, with their unreliable narrators, dissolving points of view, multiple perceptions and perspectives, often don’t have depth of character as their central value. Science fiction, with its tremendous freedom of metaphor, has sent many writers far ahead in this exploration beyond the confines of individuality—Sherpas on the slopes of the postmodern. As for elitism, the problem may be scientism: technological edge mistaken for moral superiority. The imperialism of high technocracy equals the old racist imperialism in its arrogance; to the technophile, people who aren’t in the know/in the net, who don’t have the right artifacts, don’t count. They’re proles, masses, faceless nonentities. Whether it’s fiction or history, the story isn’t about them. The story’s about the kids with the really neat, really expensive toys. So “people” comes to be operationally defined as those who have access to an extremely elaborate fast-growth industrial technology. And “technology” itself is restricted to that type. I have heard a man say perfectly seriously that the Native Americans before the Conquest had no technology. As we know, kiln-fired pottery is a naturally occurring substance, baskets ripen in the summer, and Machu Picchu just grew there. Limiting humanity to the producer-consumers of a complex industrial growth technology is a really weird idea, on a par with defining humanity as Greeks, or Chinese, or the upper-middle-class British. It leaves out a little too much. All fiction, however, has to leave out most people. A fiction interested in complex technology may legitimately leave out the (shall we say) differently technologized, as a fiction about suburban adulteries may ignore the city poor, and a fiction centered on the male psyche may omit women. Such omission may, however, be read as a statement that advantage is superiority, or that the white middle class is the whole society, or that only men are worth writing about. Moral and political statements by omission are legitimated by the consciousness of making them, insofar as the writer’s culture permits that consciousness. It comes down to a matter of taking responsibility. A denial of authorial responsibility, a willed unconsciousness, is elitist, and it does impoverish much of our fiction in every genre, including realism.

Angels sleeps in her cell, her room which should be gay with cushions or theatre programmes or comic pottery, but isn't. The distant clocks have been chiming and ringing all night to pass the time. She lies on her stomach, to hide or protect time, one arm hanging over the edge of the bed, her head wrenched sideways. Everything about her now is unformed. Her intelligence has stopped working. She is herself and, as she flounders, flies, sinks from one dream to another, unrecognizable. What does myself look like? I mean, who am I? You are an examination result, dear. Perhaps, in time, a scholarship. Perhaps an Honors Degree. Try harder. But myself - I mean myself? Perhaps you could find yourself in the Guides, or in the New Testament somewhere. If not, we can provide various substitutes, such as Joan of Arc, Florence Nightingale, Nurse Cavell. It's really none of our business, but we do keep a few heroines handy, just in case. But how shall I deal with myself? What shall I do with myself all my life? You may look in the answer book. You must control yourself, discipline yourself, sacrifice yourself, respect yourself. If necessary you may defend yourself and able yourself, and to have confidence in yourself while effacing yourself is not entirely bad. You must never, however, love yourself or pity yourself, praise yourself or allow yourself to have either will or opinion. Never indulge yourself, never be conscious of yourself, never forget yourself and above all, never be centered in yourself. We hope this is understood? But if there is no one else to love, pity or praise? If no one else is conscious of me, remembers me, if I am no one's centre? That, dear, is what God is for. As Our Lord says, "Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings and not one of them is forgotten before God?" To forget yourself in one sense is desirable, whereas, as we have said, to forget yourself in another sense is not. Now if we rewrite those subjoined sentences, strengthening them by omission of caveats, trite quotations, indirect assertions and vulgarisms everything, we feel certain, will seem a great deal clearer; or, alternatively, more clear. She twists her head, hitting the mattress with a vague, feeble gesture. "But I'll never get there," she says, stating a proved fact. "I'll never get there." The clocks repeat themselves. She turns on her back and, still asleep, rubs her stomach with the unhappy, worried expression of a child who has eaten a sour apple.

Controversy remains about what kind of ceremony is carried out in Ge 15:9–21. What/whom do the pieces represent (possibilities: sacrifice for oath, God if he reneges, nations already as good as dead, Israelites in slavery)? Whom do the birds of prey represent (nations seeking to seize available land, e.g., Ge 14, or to plunder Israel)? Whom do the implements represent (God and/or Abram)? These issues cannot currently be resolved, but a few observations can help identify some of the possible connections with the ancient world. Before we look at the options, a word is in order about what this is not. 1. It is not a sacrifice. There is no altar, no offering of the animals to deity and no ritual with the carcasses, the meat or the blood. 2. It is not divination. The entrails are not examined and no meal is offered to deity. 3. It is not an incantation. No words are spoken to accompany the ritual and no efficacy is sought—Abram is asleep. The remaining options are based on where animals are ritually slaughtered in the ancient world when it is not for the purposes of sacrifice, divination or incantation. Option 1: A covenant ceremony or, more specifically, a royal land grant ceremony. In this case the animals typically are understood as substituting for the participants or proclaiming a self-curse if the stipulations are violated. Examples of the slaughter of animals in such ceremonies but not for sacrificial purposes are numerous. In tablets from Alalakh, the throat of a lamb is slit in connection to a deed executed between Abba-El and Yarimlim. In a Mari text, the head of a donkey is cut off when sealing a formal agreement. In an Aramaic treaty of Sefire, a calf is cut in two with the explicit statement that such will be the fate of the one who breaks the treaty. In Neo-Assyrian literature, the head of a spring lamb is cut off in a treaty between Ashurnirari V and Mati’ilu, not for sacrifice but explicitly as an example of punishment. The strength of these examples lies in the contextual connection to covenant. The weakness is that only one animal is killed in these examples, and there is no passing through the pieces and no torch and firepot. Furthermore, there are significant limitations regarding the efficacy of a divine self-curse. Option 2: Purification. The “torch” (Ge 15:17) is a portable, handheld object for bringing light. The “smoking firepot” (15:17) can refer to a number of different vessels used to heat things (e.g., an oven for food, a kiln for pottery). Here the two items are generally assumed to be associated with God, but need not be symbolic representations of him. These implements are occasionally used symbolically to represent deities in ancient Near Eastern literature, but usually sun-gods (e.g., Shamash) or fire-gods (e.g., Girru/Gibil). Gibil and Kusu are often invoked together as divine torch and censer in a wide range of cultic ceremonies for purification. Abram would have probably been familiar with the role of Gibil and Kusu in purification rituals, so that function would be plausibly communicated to him by the presence of these implements. Yet in a purification role, neither the torch nor the censer ever pass between the pieces of cut-up animals in the literature available to us. Further weakness is in the fact that Yahweh doesn’t need purification and Abram is a spectator, not a participant, so neither does he. In the Mesopotamian Hymn to Gibil (the torch), the god purifies the objects used in the ritual, but the only objects in the ritual in Ge 15 are the dead animals, and it is difficult to understand why they would need to be purified.

The large bedroom was crammed to overflowing with family relics, and examples of the various arts in which Lady Emily had brilliantly dabbled at one time or another. Part of one wall was decorated with a romantic landscape painted on the plaster, the fourpost bed was hung with her own skilful embroidery, watercolour drawings in which a touch of genius fought and worsted an entire want of technique hung on the walls. Pottery, woodcarving, enamels, all bore witness to their owner’s insatiable desire to create. From their earliest days the Leslie children had thought of their mother as doing or making something, handling brush, pencil, needle with equal enthusiasm, coming in late to lunch with clay in her hair, devastating the drawing-room with her far-flung painting materials, taking cumbersome pieces of embroidery on picnics, disgracing everyone by a determination to paint the village cricket pavilion with scenes from the life of St Francis for which she made the gardeners pose. What Mr Leslie thought no one actually knew, for Mr Leslie had his own ways of life and rarely interfered. Once only had he been known to make a protest. In the fever of an enamelling craze, Lady Emily had a furnace put up in the service-room, thus making it extremely difficult for Gudgeon and the footman to get past, and moreover pressing the footman as her assistant when he should have been laying lunch.

It is no wonder that historians trace the birth of Western civilization to these jewels of the Aegean, Ionian, and Mediterranean seas. The Greek Isles are home to wide-ranging and far-reaching cultural traditions and mythic tales, not to mention the colorful history and unforgettable vistas that still draw thousands of tourists to the region every year. Minoan ruins stand alongside Byzantine churches and Crusader fortresses. Terra-cotta pots spilling over with hibiscus flowers adorn blinding-white stucco houses that reflect the sun’s dazzling light. Fishing villages perched upon craggy cliffs overlook clusters of colorful boats in island harbors. Centuries-old citrus and olive groves dot the hillsides. Lush vegetation and rocky shores meet isolated stretches of sand and an azure sea. Masts bob left and right on sailboats moored in secluded inlets. Each island is a world unto itself. Although outsiders and neighbors have inhabited, visited, and invaded these islands throughout the centuries, the islands’ rugged geography and small size have also ensured a certain isolation. In this environment, traditional ways of life thrive. The arts--pottery, glass blowing, gem carving, sculpture, and painting, among others--flourish here today, as contemporary craft artists keep alive techniques begun in antiquity. In the remote hilltop villages of Kárpathos, for example, artisans practice crafts that date back eons, and inhabitants speak a dialect close to ancient Greek. Today, to walk along the pebbled pathways of a traditional Greek mountain village or the marbled streets of an ancient acropolis is to step back in time. To meander at a leisurely pace through these island chains by boat is to be captivated by the same dramatic landscapes and enchanted islets that make the myths of ancient Greece so compelling. To witness the Mediterranean sun setting on the turquoise sea is to receive one of life’s greatest blessings.

The origin myth of the Tukano speaks of the time, eons ago, when humans first settled the great rivers of the Amazon basin. It seems that 'supernatural beings' accompanied them on this journey and gifted them the fundamentals upon which to build a civilized life. From the 'Daughter of the Sun' they received the gift of fire and the knowledge of horticulture, pottery-making, and many other crafts. 'The serpent-shaped canoe of the first settlers' was steered by a superhuman 'Helmsman.' Meanwhile other supernaturals 'travelled by canoe over all the rivers and ... explored the remote hill ranges; they pointed out propitious sites for houses or fields, or for hunting and fishing, and they left their lasting imprint on many spots so that future generations would have ineffaceable proof of their earthly days and would forever remember them and their teachings.

the more cultured they are, the more they will be trapped into thinking that they are effective at what they are doing in real business (something psychologists call the halo effect, the mistake of thinking that skills in, say, skiing translate unfailingly into skills in managing a pottery workshop or a bank department, or that a good chess player would be a good strategist in real life).2

The material is not the sign of the creative feeling for life: of the warmth and sympathy and reverence which foster being; techniques are not the sign; “art” is not the sign. The sign is the light that dwells within the act, whatever its nature or its medium.

God wanted us to know that He is willing to come meet us where we are, stuck in the mud, and create a new life for us.

I needed to stop comparing myself to other people and commit to an actor’s life, with all its ups and downs. Then, I needed to change my approach. Being an actor is a lifestyle. I wasn’t able to shop at Pottery Barn because I hadn’t chosen the well-worn path of a conventional job. I had chosen the path of an artist. I needed to embrace my decision.

DOING SOMETHING It is so much easier to not do something than to do something. Even the smallest task, like filling out a Scholastic Books order form or putting away the butter, requires time, focus, and follow-through. It’s astounding, actually, that anything gets done at all, by anyone. But then, let’s say you finally are prepared and determined to do that thing, whatever it is, but you wake up to find that your basement has flooded and you must spend your day making phone calls to the contractor, plumber, and carpet people. Or not that but something else—perhaps you must stand before a committee for approval, a committee that neither grasps your intent nor appreciates your ingenuity, and anyway, they are in a bit of a hurry to break for lunch. Yet. Still. Somehow. I am encouraged to see that despite the colossal effort, despite the odds against one, despite the mere constraints of time and schedules and sore throats, houses do get built, pottery gets glazed, e-mails get sent, trees get planted, shoes get reheeled, manifestos get Xeroxed, films get shot, highways get repaved, cakes get frosted, stories get told.

I’m mesmerized by lipstick prints on coffee cups. By the lines of lips against white pottery. By the color chosen by the woman who sat and sipped and lived life. By the mark she leaves behind. Some people read tea leaves, and others can tell your future through the lines on your palm. I think I’d like to read lipstick marks on coffee mugs. To learn how to differentiate yearning from satiation. To know the curve of deep-rooted joy or the line of bottomless grief. To be able to say this deep blue-red you chose and how firmly you planted your lips, speaks of love on the horizon. But, darling, you must be sure to stand in your own truth. That barely-there nude that circles the entire rim? You are exploding into lightness and possibilities beyond what you currently know. The way the gloss only shows when the light hits it, and the coffee has sloshed all over the saucer? People need to take the time to see you whole but my god, you’re glorious and messy and wonderful and free. The deep purple bruise was almost etched in a single spot, and most of the cup left unconsumed. Oh, love. Let me hold the depth of your ache. It is true. He’s not coming back. I know you already know this, but do you also know this is not the end? Love. This is not the end. I imagine that I can know entire stories by these marks on discarded mugs. I imagine that I know something intimate and true about the woman who left them. I imagine that I could take those mugs home one day, and an entire novel worth of characters would pour out, just like that.

The most notable function of Japanese art is to express the melancholy of mortality and the inevitable decay of beauty, to act as the catalyst for the experience of extreme sorrow. The mindfulness is found in every aspect of Japanese culture, in pottery, pop songs, haiku, and even in the way of tea. When it comes to achieving that desired quality of existential desolation in Japanese garden, it's moss that gets the job done.

But it can be affirmed that an aesthetically successful pot is a utensil satisfying life-sustaining needs with an element of its creator’s character ever present. In recognizing this one can see that using pottery is a daily communion and a celebration of life. This spirit is first given freely in the creation of the pot and then again in the daily activities that literally sustain and celebrate life. And

It has often been pointed out that the Japanese educational system aims to produce a high average level of achievement for all, rather than excellence for a few. Students in school are not encouraged to stand out or ask questions, with the result that the Japanese become conditioned to a life of the average. Being average and boring here is the very essence of society, the factor which keeps the wheels of all those social systems turning so smoothly. It need hardly be said that this is one of the major drawbacks of Japanese life. However, in watching the pottery class at Oomoto, the weak points of the American educational system became evident as well. Americans are taught from childhood to show creativity. If you do not ‘become a unique person’, then you are led to believe you have something wrong with you. Such thinking becomes a stumbling block: for people brought up in that atmosphere, creating a simple tea bowl is a great hardship. This is the ‘poison’ to which David was referring. I sometimes think that the requirement to ‘be interesting’ inculcated by American education might be a very cruel thing. Since most of us lead commonplace lives, it is a foregone conclusion that we will be disappointed. But in Japan, people are conditioned to be satisfied with the average, so they can’t fail but be happy with their lots. If

February 17 Broken Pieces I am forgotten by them as though I were dead; I have become like broken pottery. But I trust in You, O lord; I say, “You are my God.” My times are in your hands.—Psalm 31:12, 14-15a I have a friend who does beautiful work with pieces of broken china and pottery. She gave me a lovely blue and white frame as a gift. She took the china and broke it into small enough pieces to fit the frame. She covered a plain frame with a white mortar and fit the broken pieces of blue and white china around the frame in a way that covered most of the area and filled in the spaces in between with more of the mortar. What a work of art! Not only is it beautiful, but it is custom made to fit my taste and home. But even more beautiful is the note that came with the gift. She wrote: my life has been full of broken pieces. Some of them are a result of my own manipulation and control and some are through no one’s fault, but a result of living in a fallen world. Regardless of what I give the Lord, He takes those pieces and adds them to a beautiful work of art. I hope this constantly reminds you of the Great Planner and Master Creator. We surely can make a mess of our lives, can’t we? But regardless of the mess we’ve made, no matter how fragmented we become, if we offer ourselves to God and trust in Him, He can take all the broken pieces of our life and make them into his work of art. And His work is so beautiful! His plan is custom made for each individual. Our times are in His Hands.

Be merciful to me, LORD, for I am in distress; my eyes grow weak with sorrow, my soul and body with grief. My life is consumed by anguish and my years by groaning; my strength fails because of my affliction,4 and my bones grow weak. Because of all my enemies, I am the utter contempt of my neighbors and an object of dread to my closest friends— those who see me on the street flee from me. I am forgotten as though I were dead; I have become like broken pottery. For I hear many whispering, “Terror on every side!” They conspire against me and plot to take my life. But I trust in you, LORD; I say, “You are my God.” My times are in your hands; deliver me from the hands of my enemies, from those who pursue me. Let your face shine on your servant; save me in your unfailing love. Let me not be put to shame, LORD, for I have cried out to you; but let the wicked be put to shame and be silent in the realm of the dead. Let their lying lips be silenced, for with pride and contempt they speak arrogantly against the righteous.

This legend traces back to the sixteenth century, when the Japanese tea ceremony underwent a seismic shift. Immaculate dishes were replaced with chipped bowls. People drank from pottery that was worn and weathered. They called this practice wabi sabi. Wabi sabi is the art of honoring the beauty in imperfection. It’s not about creating intentional imperfections. It’s about accepting that flaws are inevitable—and recognizing that they don’t stop something from becoming sublime. That’s been a dominant theme in Tadao Ando’s architecture and his life. He’s an imperfectionist: he’s selective about what he decides to do well.

the more interesting their conversation, the more cultured they are, the more they will be trapped into thinking that they are effective at what they are doing in real business (something psychologists call the halo effect, the mistake of thinking that skills in, say, skiing translate unfailingly into skills in managing a pottery workshop or a bank department, or that a good chess player would be a good strategist in real life)

In practicing the Japanese art of Kintsukuroi, one repairs broken pottery by filling in the cracks with gold, silver, or platinum. The choice to highlight the breaks with precious metals not only acknowledges them, but also pays tribute to the vessel that has been torn apart by the mutability of life. The previously broken object is considered more beautiful for its imperfections. In life, too, even greater brilliance can be found after the mending.

Kathy: Does it hurt a lot, getting a tattoo? Stephanie: Are you thinking about it? Kathy: Sort of. Stephanie: What would you get? Kathy: I don’t know, something symbolic. What does yours symbolize? Stephanie: Well, the image comes from a piece of Minoan pottery that was made on Crete during the Bronze Age. The Minoans had this beautiful way of representing sea life that I fell in love with in my college art history class, and I got the tattoo in my twenties when I first moved to New York, so probably what it symbolized most of all was a big fuck-you to my parents, who hated tattoos and were scandalized. Long pause. Kathy: Where did you go to college again? Stephanie: U. of Illinois Champaign. You? Kathy: Harvard. It’s kind of amazing we’re friends, isn’t it? Stephanie: I’d say we’re doubles partners. Kathy: Nice. Stephanie: You can take it. Kathy: You get the chairs, I’ll grab us a couple of iced teas.

Wilhelm Rau has compiled the Vedic references to pottery from the oldest strands of the Black Yajurveda and found that although the potter’s wheel was known, it was hand made pottery that was prescribed for the ritual sphere. This suggests to him that “the more primitive technique persisted in the ritual sphere while in secular life more advanced methods of potting had already been adopted.” Should this assumption be correct, “we can pin down the transition from hand-made to wheel-thrown pottery, as far as the Aryans are concerned, (down) to the earlier phases of Vedic times” (Rau 1974, 141).12 Of relevance to this line of argument is a verse from the Taittīrlya Samhitā (4, 5, 4), stating that what is turned on the wheel is Āsuric and what is made without the wheel is godly (e.g., Kuzmina 1983, 21). According to Rau’s philological investigations, the characteristic of this oldest pottery was that it was made of clay mixed with various materials, some of them organic, resulting in porous pots. These pots were poorly-fired and ranged in size from about 0.24 m to 1.0 m in diameter at the opening and from 0.24 m to 0.40 m in height. Furthermore, they showed a lack of plastic decoration and were unpainted (Rau 1974, 142). Of further relevance is the fact that firing was accomplished by the covered baking method between two layers of raw bricks in a simple open pit. In later times this was done with materials producing red color. Rau advises excavators to be “on the lookout for ceramics of this description among their finds” (142).

I want my life to be like--like making pottery. I want to enjoy it while it's happening, not just for where it might get me eventually.

The world saw me as a big, scary black man. Meanwhile, here I am, shopping on Pottery Barn for faux fur bathrobes and table linens. There were few things I enjoyed more in life than a beautifully set table. Add candles and a centerpiece and I was in heaven. I will sit at a table and eat shitty food if there’s a silver napkin ring, no lie. Don’t get me started on Martha Stewart Living, domestic porn at its finest.

Whether you’re painting, throwing pottery, raising children, or building a business, we’re all Spiritual Artists in the act of the creative process. Our task in life is to express our unique “is-ness” through the creative process.

Example 2. Schmidt’s method began with the indisputable observation that the history of human people is a long story of innumerable migrations. So, let us imagine a geographical area occupied by two different tribes, call them A and B, and that a part of the territory occupied by tribe A bisects the territory of tribe B, as shown in Figure 1.3. Figure 1.3. Geographical layout of two hypothetical cultures It is a safe assumption that one tribe migrated into the area ahead of the other one.[21] If A arrived earlier, then B would presumably have appeared as a unified tribe, but then split up and settled on the two sides of A’s unusually narrow extension. The previously unencumbered existence of this extension would be rather unusual since B’s settlement demonstrates that both adjoining sides are capable of sustaining life. On the other hand, if B had settled there earlier, it would have existed as a geographically unified tribe for a time until it was divided by A’s invasion, a far more common occurrence. Already it would appear that the latter option is more likely, but let us propose some further data to support the conclusion. Suppose that culture A has many more cultural “forms” than culture B. By forms Schmidt meant parts of objects that do not contribute directly to their pure function, such as decorations on pottery, curved ends of hunting bows or special designs on clothes. In this theoretical example we stipulate that these and other similar items are found in A, but not in B. If A had been there first, B would have needed to subdue A in A’s former territory, and we should expect to find residual forms of A’s culture (technically called “survivals”) in B’s area, but we stipulated that forms that are popular in A are not present in B’s territory. All other things being equal, it seems pretty clear that the people of tribe A came later into this territory than those of B, and that A brought cultural innovations that B is lacking. Most probably, then, B is therefore, the older culture.

Like a shepherd and sheep, its principle is simple, redirection towards the obligatory path, and speaking of Ozcan, he is the most proficient in this game. Watch the professionals do it in the reorientation of functional organizations. There is no need to recruit them all, it is enough for them to do what a shepherd does with a flock of sheep; blocking the roads in front of them, putting a dog in one place, standing and waving his stick in another place, to force them to take the path he wants, towards the barn. And if you spoke to one of them, it would swear to you that it is going the way it wants, which it chose with its full will, or chosen for them by their leader at the forefront of the herd, who knows the secrets of the ways, believing that they go the way they want. He decided that he should play the game according to its laws since they are sheep, so do not try to address them or convince them, but rather direct them to where you want. He did not know anything about deterministic algorithms at the time, his decision was based on his innate, something inside him. He succeeded, however, by making a butterfly flutter, far away. Some straying out of the Shepherd’s path, then another artificial flutter associated with the first to accelerate the process, and then a third, and a fourth, then the chaos ensued, and the hurricanes blew up all the inevitable of Alpha Headquarters. A butterfly fluttered where no one was watching, he studied and planned it carefully. Words by a revolutionary Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish, summarized the whole story… Throw a stone into the stagnant water, rivers will break out Ring your bells in the kingdom of silence and sing your anthem And let the wall of fear break into dust like pottery

As it turned out, Cosima had quite a flair for flavor. She created things that shocked Kat, who had only ever followed her mother's more mundane recipes. One Saturday, Cosima made rosemary, stilton, and walnut bread and their father ran up and down the street after breakfast, telling his neighbors he was training for a marathon. Another Saturday her bacon and brie bread caused Peter Rubens to quit his sales job and revisit a great passion for pottery and carpentry that he'd long before abandoned. Kat personally puts her father's remarriage down to the chocolate and chili bread Cosima made when she was six, Kat liked her stepmother and loved that she was finally free to leave her father and little sister and go out into the world to live her own life.

I wish I’d fallen softly. Light and graceful like a feather drifting slowly to the earth on a warm and dreamy summer’s day. I wish that I’d landed softly too. But there is nothing soft or graceful about that devastating moment when the worst has come to pass. The unavoidable truth is that it is hard, cold and brutal. All that you know to be true and good in life shatters in an instant. You feel like a delicate pottery bowl violently tossed from your place of rest, watching yourself crash and scatter across the hostile dark earth. The sound is deafening. Time stops. Inside, the quiet ache of shock and heartbreak slowly makes its grip known. They cut deep, these jagged edges of broken sherds. You gasp for air hungrily, yet somehow forget how to breathe.

Here Teo struck out left, as instructed and soon came upon a large ditch. He stared down at its contents. There were several large mounds that had been covered neatly with dirt, but here and there an animal bone, or a shard of broken pottery, protruded through the soil. It seemed rather sad, Teo thought, that the span of a man’s life could be reduced to piles of refuse, some of which would surely last far longer than the man himself. Yet, it was inspiring too, that a man could live alone and endure, day after day, perhaps for years on end.

The Way of Kings ‘Life before death. Strength before weakness. Journey before destination.’ “I feel each of the things you mention, Sadeas,” Dalinar said, eyes forward. “But I don’t always let them out. A man’s emotions are what define him, and control is the hallmark of true strength. To lack feeling is to be dead, but to act on every feeling is to be a child.” "But expectations were like fine pottery. The harder you held them, the more likely they were to crack." "Bitterness is repaid more often than kindness." "Sometimes we find it hardest to accept in others that which we cling to in ourselves." "Beards were like axehound pups. Boys dreamed of the day they’d get one, never realizing how annoying they could be." "Much like the aforementioned knife to the back, a clever gibe is most effective when it is unanticipated." "Each man has his place. Mine is to make insults. Yours is to be in-sluts.” - Wit roasting Sadeas!! "Kaladin was like a moldy crust on a starving man’s plate; not the first bite, but still doomed." "To speak of what might be is forbidden,” the voice said. “To speak of what was depends on perspective." "what is the point? We fight to get Shardblades, then use those Shardblades to fight to get more Shardblades. It’s a circle, round and round we go, chasing our tails so we can be better at chasing our tails." “‘Candle flames,’” Litima continued. The selection was from The Way of Kings, read from the very copy that Gavilar had once owned. “‘A dozen candles burned themselves to death on the shelf before me. Each of my breaths made them tremble. To them, I was a behemoth, to frighten and destroy. And yet, if I strayed too close, they could destroy me. My invisible breath, the pulses of life that flowed in and out, could end them freely, while my fingers could not do the same without being repaid in pain.’” “‘I understood in a moment of stillness,’” Litima read. “‘Those candle flames were like the lives of men. So fragile. So deadly. Left alone, they lit and warmed. Let run rampant, they would destroy the very things they were meant to illuminate. Embryonic bonfires, each bearing a seed of destruction so potent it could tumble cities and dash kings to their knees.'" 'I believe that my own morality—which answers only to my heart—is more sure and true than the morality of those who do right only because they fear retribution." "The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon. Too often, we forget that.

You would think that one of the largest perennial streams in the American Southwest, brought to life by a wilderness holding deep snows in its higher reaches, would be full of life. But the Gila River is all but dead. And so is the forest. Much of it looks devastated. There used to be wolves, grizzly bears, Merriam’s elk, beavers, black-footed ferrets, and river otters here. Most of them exist, now, only on the cracked pottery of the long-vanished Mogollon.

want my life to be like—like making pottery. I want to enjoy it while it’s happening, not just for where it might get me eventually.

What do you want life to be like when you're old?" "I want to live in a cottage," she said. "I want a perennial garden and fruit trees. I want to learn how to make bread, and how to do pottery. And I want a cat.

What do you want your life to be like when you're old? "I want to live in a cottage," she said. "I want a perennial garden and fruit trees. I want to learn how to make bread, and how to do pottery. And I want a cat.

you who will, like pottery, fire your life slowly, and yet with great passion.

The earliest relics at Jericho date to an era before humans invented pottery, around 9500 b.c.e., a millennium and a half earlier than the pits of Aberdeenshire’s Warren Field. In antiquity, people came to Jericho for two reasons: a freshwater spring and the Moon. Jericho’s spring, now named Ein es-Sultan, was a popular gathering spot for the hunter-gatherer people called the Natufians. Beyond its life-giving waters, a spring is also a potent symbol for people fixated on human fertility, as we know many Neolithic people were. Like other early hunter-gatherer groups, the Natufians are known by the tiny stone tools they left behind. They are called lunates: small crescent-shaped stones used to cut grasses. Natufian hunter-gatherer groups visited the Jericho spring in warm seasons. Around 9600 b.c.e., a period of droughts and cold called the Younger Dryas finally ended, and the Natufians stayed put in Jericho. The oldest city on Earth grew up around these water seekers. Befitting the spring’s connection to fertility rituals, Jericho became a pilgrimage site for worshippers of the Moon. Scholars have a few theories for the origin of the city’s name—some say it derives from a word meaning “fragrant,” describing its abundant flowers—but the Palestinian government’s tourism office describes Jericho as “the City of the Moon.” Jericho was an early center of worship for a Canaanite god named Yarikh, a god represented by the Moon. People traveled to the city to visit a temple to his honor. This may also explain the origins of other proto-cities of the third millennium b.c.e. The temple probably came first, and a city stirred to life in the buildings erected around it.