...was one of the most extraordinary books I have ever come across in my life:  Centering: In Pottery, Poetry and the Person (1964), by Mary Caroline Richards.  This particular book proved to have such an impact on me that I consider it to be one of the most tremendously life-changing books which I have read over the years.

Mary Caroline Richards (1916-1999) was a visionary artist, poet, and teacher.  She received a doctorate in English literature from the University of California at Berkeley and taught at Black Mountain College and other universities.  As she says in Centering, "During one period, when people asked me what I did, I was uncertain what to answer; I guessed I could say I taught English, wrote poetry, and made pottery. What was my occupation? I finally gave up and said 'Person.'"

A simple person, I guess, but she was as rare, valuable, and as astonishing as all "persons" are.  Richards was one of those extraordinary spirits who can find the most profound meaning in the ordinary events and circumstances of our lives.  She was also the sort of writer who can take the most commonplace object or event and transform it into a spiritual vision, radiant with meaning and truth. Her words are treasures that you linger over, think about, and do your best to make part of your own being. 

Her insights into the whole idea of centering can change your very existence.  By the time she had written this book, it was obvious that she had pondered the idea of centering for many years, and if ever there was a human being who knew how to center herself, she did. 

Richards' book made me think for the first time about how how using our creative abilities is a kind of centering.  I have long felt that one of the principle aims of our existence should be to live in harmony with the creative unfoldment of the universe.  If anything in our world is actually real and actually means something, it must be creativity itself.  Those people who can direct the natural outpouring of their personalities into creation, instead of lust for power, coin of the realm, or even one ring to rule them all... they are the ones who are in tune with the most basic energies of the universe. Forget Nietzsche and his fanatical ravings about the will to power, forget the trophy house, forget the creature comforts and the vacations and updating your resume... the one and only thing which matters in our lives is our ability to transmute our experiences and our vision into creative art.  Throw a pot, write poetry, compose music, carve some wood, design a new spreadsheet...  not only are you making the most appropriate use of your energies, you are centering yourself in the best possible way.

Here are some sample quotes from Richards' text:

Centering is the image I use for the process of balance which will enable us to step along that thread feeling it not as a thread but a sphere. It will, it is hoped, help us to walk through extremes with an incorruptible instinct for wholeness, finding our way continuous, self-completing. This thread can be as limber as breath. It is as tough as a wild grape vine. Continuity, of movement and variation and organic process and appearing and disappearing and fruitfulness and withering and seeding, lives in the image of the vine, upon which hangs the long poem which ends this book.

I am by now convinced that wisdom is not the product of mental effort. Wisdom is a state of the total being, in which capacities for knowledge and for love, for survival and for death, for imagination, inspiration, intuition, for all the fabulous functioning of this human being who we are, come into a center with their forces, come into an experience of meaning that can voice itself as wise action.

I, like everyone I know, am instinctively motivated toward symbols of wholeness. What is a simpler, more natural one than the pot fired? Wholeness may be thought of as a kind of inner equilibrium, in which all our capacities have been brought into functioning as an organism. The potencies of the whole organism flow into the gestures of any part. And the sensation in any part reverberates throughout the soul.

The experience of centering was one I particularly sought because I thought of myself as dispersed, interested in too many things. I envied people who were "single-minded," who had one powerful talent and who knew when they got up in the morning what it was they had to do. Whereas I, wherever I turned, felt the enchantment: to the window for the sweetness of the air; to the door for the passing figures; to the teapot, the typewriter, the knitting needles, the pets, the pottery, the newspaper, the telephone. Wherever I looked, I could have lived.

We are transformed, not by adopting attitudes toward ourselves but by bringing into center all the elements of our sensations and our thinking and our emotions and our will: all the realities of our bodies and our souls. All the dark void in us of our undiscovered selves, all the small light of our discovered being. All the drive of our hungers, and our fairest and blackest dreams. All, all the elements come into center, into union with all other elements. And in such a state they become quite different in function than when they are separated and segregated and discriminated between or against. When we act out of an inner unity, when all of our selves is present in what we do, then we can be said to be "on center."

There is much, much more.  If you are wondering where to start on your quest for your center, get this book and read it several times.

Richards also wrote several other books which are well worth your time:

• The Crossing Point (1973).
• Toward Wholeness: Rudolf Steiner Education in America (1980).
• Opening Our Moral Eye (1996).

A film has recently been made about about Richards entitled M.C. Richards:  The Fire Within.  I have not seen it, but it looks interesting. 

Well, after discovering Richards, I knew I was well on my way to finding my center.  But I felt that there was surely much more I needed to discover.  What I started wondering about next was predictable... next

Centering   •   M.C. Richards   •   Tea   •   Stones   •   Exercises   •   Meditations   •   Breath   •   Chakras  •  
Four Elements  •   Daoist Scriptures   •   Cult of Tranquility   •   Etc.