There is a temperature at which clay stops being clay and becomes stone, and there is no arguing with it. You cannot want it faster. The kiln takes the time the kiln takes, and for the first ten years of my working life I treated this as a personal insult.
I ran my studio the way I had run everything: at a sprint, measured in output. Mugs per week. Orders cleared. I would open the kiln early, too hot still, greedy for the result, and I lost work that way, cracked clean down the side, ruined by my own impatience.
The cost was not only the broken pots. A pot fired fast is a pot that remembers the hurry. Sometimes it holds together long enough to be sold, and then it fails months later, a hairline giving way in someone else’s kitchen, in another city entirely. My rush, delivered to a stranger, arriving late.
A pot fired fast is a pot that remembers the hurry.
What the kiln taught me, eventually, is that some things convert only under steady heat over time, and that this is true of far more than clay. Attention converts that way. Trust. A marriage. A child’s sense that you are actually there. You cannot open any of them early to check.
Now I fire slow. I sit with the closed kiln and do the thing I once found unbearable, which is wait. The pace costs me money, I am certain of it. But I no longer send my hurry out into other people’s homes to crack quietly when I am not looking.