A Sensory Inventory

I've been paying attention to the wrong things. Not badly — just at the wrong scale. I kept waiting to feel ready, feel inspired, feel like myself again. What I didn't notice was that myself was already here, in the small and the tactile and the close. So I made a list. Five senses. What's actually in front of me.

On my living room floor, three pieces of unfinished pottery are resting.

I say resting because "abandoned" isn't quite right, and neither is "waiting." They're just there — fully dried, going nowhere — and I've stopped trying to decide what they mean. I call them my unfinished sentences.

The oldest one was an attempt to scale up an egg-shaped vessel I loved making years ago, back when I had a dedicated studio corner and a kind of voracious hunger for clay. We moved. The corner didn't come with us. The piece dried out before I could finish the top half, and I haven't decided yet whether to fire it into permanence or return it to water.

The wavy, undulating one came from last August, when I made the mistake of trying two vulnerable things at once — touching clay again for the first time in years, and posting about it publicly. I was caught between what I felt and what I wanted to be seen feeling. Neither worked. I walked away discouraged.

The most recent is an amphora. Half an hour to find the form, which became the final form. One arm missing. The mouth unresolved. Larger than I intended, smaller than the drawing I've been making of it for years. Incomplete and somehow complete, which might be the most honest thing I've made in a while.

I haven't touched clay since. But it's always in my mind. The distance between mind and hands has just been longer lately.

After our last trip to Japan, I came home with a small, curated collection of incense — coreless, paper, match, decorated paper, and the ones I love most: neriko, the kneaded kind, hand-rolled into small black balls.

The brand is Shōyeidō. I first encountered them through a box I bought at Everyday Needs and photographed for reference. Then one morning in Kyoto, walking aimlessly after breakfast, I looked up and saw their shop across the street. Same logo. The coincidence felt like an endorsement.

They burn in my pottery now. That feels right.

On my birthday this year, I was given a Roland FP-10 digital piano.

I've been on it constantly. Alice Sara Ott's Mermerising, played on an upright piano for NPR Tiny Desk, is the kind of performance that makes you want to stop wanting and just begin. I've been learning Satie. Some Chopin. The piano I have is not the piano I might want. But I want to learn to sound beautiful on what's available to me, and that feels like a useful philosophy beyond music.

Photography is a sight thing — until you print it.

My Canon Selphy CP1500 has become one of my most-used objects. A pack of paper for $40–50 NZD yields exactly 108 4×6 prints. No ink calculation, no refill anxiety, no decision fatigue. Just the particular pleasure of holding an image you took.

I also got an Instax Wide Link. The larger format genuinely is more joy. There's something about real estate on a print — more sky, more context, more room to remember.

My unfinished pottery is currently holding the incense. My printed photos are going into a junk journal. Things are finding each other.

It's 8:34pm on a Friday and I'm making pesto pasta with a fried egg on top. The pesto is from a jar, until I learn otherwise.

Some things are still in progress. That's allowed.