BOTTLE BOTTOMS

ilove these pieces.  they are not particularly great selling ornaments.  They are not particularly easy to make.  We rarely get orders for them. but i like them, i do.  they speak 2nd story. 

 I like the way the smoothed glass feels in my hand, i like the way the simple sand casted aluminum fits snugly in there withthe clay bead hand -formed from real haitian dirt.. i like it all.  

Maybe it is the large amount of time spent walking through garbage. Some of you don’t know that the land between Jubilee and the sea has become the city dump.  Trucks come in and out of there, all day long, past our workshop, beside the school carrying the refuse from the city.  

It is driven out, dumped and set on fire. There are kids and adults that wait for these trucks to come.  They hurry to get through the mound before the fire is set.  Yesterday i watched two little men ( 4 and 6 year olds ? ) proudly carrying out large pieces of styrofoam, i thought, good for you, i would have grabbed that myself. 

And the glass.  There is a lot of glass.  The dusty, sandy sometimes muddy ground sparkles with  green, blue and  brown shards.   The bottle bottoms are magnets to me.  When we first came here i was constantly collecting them in my bag and bringing them home to clean up.  

It’s like they are broken exactly right.  

Pick them up,  and put them in the hands of the creative soul and they leap to life. 

kind of like all of us. 

I love how these simple honest forms shout:  beauty for brokenness… though we are not as we were, this story , this chapter, can shine and extend and bring a beauty that pierces through hopelessness with truth and light.   

The point is not to never get broken, i think.  maybe the point is to let myself get picked up, when i am . The point is that the Beloved One, the rabbi with dust between his toes… is searching for the likes of  us. Broken, and honest and surrendered to Him.   Oh what He can do with all that ! ha !