The courage of a humble Potter
Crafting beautiful art with the skills and strength of a warrior-artist, learning about the deep tradition of pottery as a craft and physicality of it is really cool. Imagine, hoisting clay by the river Nile. You’re knee deep in the most important trade river of the time as you plow out your own cut in a river of commerce that has been used to support empires.
With your plough you canoe out chunks of the sticky clay that is layered next to a receded river bed. Your core is on fire. Your shoulders burn and the brim of sweat starts pouring from your brow. But you’re collecting what you need to begin YOUR craft.
It’s not over.
You’re then going to pile this clay up and bring it back to your shop. And it’s going to be a lot of clay. Piled into buckets that you bringback to your wagon and horse. That is if you even had a wagon and horse. If you were poor than you’d be carrying however much you could by hand.
Have you ever tried to carry groceries back during a walk that normally only takes half an hour?
Your hands are shaking. Traps are on fire. And you have to possibly take several brakes to readjust your grip. And the whole time, you’re hoping the bags don’t rip.
Imagine you did that daily.
Learning aout people who lived very ordinary lives like this extraordinary to me. Ok get hyped.and it gets me excited to train.
This potter would take the stock of pottery clay and slap it on a potter’s wheel and turn that wheel like turning a huge tornado ball or Russian twist without shraing their back and make some amazing handcrafted art. Practical Art. Used to transport all kinds of substances across land and sea.
Now our potter isn’t just some anonymous potter. His name, is Yasser.
He struggles to get through while supporting his family and the smallest tremor can unfurl his small stability.
And guess what, that’s exactly what happens when a groups of gangsters confront our humble friend in the Cairo market.
But Yasir has something that these Street gangsters will never hope to achieve. He has the beloved masculine virtue of courage.
If you’d like to find out if yasir’s courage call mother courage of a humble Potter, is enough to fight back a bunch of sleazy gangsters I encourage you to check out novel I’m writing through the link below.
