Centering in Pottery, Poetry, and the Person

INTRODUCTION TO THE SECOND EDITION

Introduction to the Second Edition Centering is a verb. It is an ongoing process, and here it is, twenty-five years after its first publication, reaffirmed as a book. Twenty-five years, and it has never gone out of print, which indicates the seminal quality of its imagery. I have said that Centering as an archetype comes through the potter's wheel and the spinning clay taking shape. But archetypes are Beings of special subtlety and paradox . SoCentering is not a model, but a way ofbalancing, a spiritual resource in times of conflict, an imagination. It seems in certain lights to be an alchemical vessel, a retort, which bears an integration of purposes, an integration oflevels of consciousness. It can be called to, like a divine ear. If I were to write the book now, there are two things I would change and one addition I would make. The two elements have evolved in the years between the first writing and now. They are actually connected with our collective consciousness as were the insights of the original. I would not use the masculine pronoun to designate persons of both sexes. Iwould not write "man" when I mean "person" or "human being." I would not write, as I did in the original introduction, "Man may be born into the world, a whole man." This would be changed even as our consciousness has changed, has become more discriminating, more subtle, more conscientious: "We may be born into the world as whole persons. We are all women-folk, male or female, featured toward this birth. We are all Mary, virgin and undelivered, to whom the announcement has been made, in whom the infant grows." Simply, we have outgrown the masculine pronoun as the referent for both sexes. "The changing, changeful person, mobile and intact, finding his way on." Couldn't it be generally agreed to realign the genders, to "changing, changeful persons, finding xvii our way on," or "their way on"? We English majors were fine-tuned to the "one . . . he" syndrome. We did not challenge the assumptions behind the grammar (the politics of language). We learned the rules and practiced them quite unconsciously, docile until meaning began to awaken in us and we began to hear what we were saying. A strong and turbulent time, filled with the juice and joy of our evolving awareness. No blame. For we are well aware of the passionate justification given for continuing in the "man" tradition, especially as it translates from the German generic Mensch. And there must surely develop a better solution than the "he/she" or "s/he." This is part of our new work: to find the new forms that will be needed as our minds change . . . as our perceptions widen. As our minds change . . . metanoia . . . what are the arts of transformation? The second change I would make is to add to the content a more adequate treatment of antipathy and the Centering process in relation to it. Centering, I say, is the discipline of bringing in (i.e., of sympathy or empathy) rather than of leaving out. Of saying "Yes,Yes"to what we behold. To what is holy and to what is unbearable. But my experience tells me now that there is an important crucial stage of saying Yes to a No. For resistance also must be embraced. Not only accepting resistance but practicing it. The metabolism goes something like this perhaps: We become ill. We injest the illness, say Yes to it. Trust it, listen to what it is telling us. But if we continue in this surrender, we may indeed be overtaken by weakness. A moment in my own biography came when I lifted my hand weakly and admitted, "I have no resistance." I heard myself say the words, and a new impulse faintly beat in my breast. No resistance . . . I was a patsy for any wandering virus. I began to feel a kind of feeble indignation. My own interpretation of Centering, it now seems to me, had grown one-sided. It would be the severest discipline for me to integrate the No, to reject, to judge. What was to become of love then, how about loving the enemy and doing good to those who revile us? I "love" the tiger, but I do not put my head in its mouth. What a riddle it is. It was ten years after the publication of Centering that I had this conscious breakthrough. I have been a faithful student of...