The kiln took fourteen hours to come up to temperature, which is an act of patience I had to re-learn after a decade on film sets. On a film set, things wait for you. At the kiln, you wait for the clay.
There is a particular quality to the silence inside a Jaipur courtyard at four in the morning, when the kiln is roaring and the rest of the house is asleep. The fire makes a sound like a soft river. The air smells of warm brick and a little of gas.
"Acting taught me to wait for someone else to be ready. Clay taught me to wait for nobody at all."
I started throwing seven years ago, in a small studio in Echo Park, with a teacher who told me that the wheel would tell me when I was anxious. He was right.