I believe certain books, just like people, appear in our lives to teach, to confirm, and to enlighten us. Centering: In Pottery, Poetry, and the Person by M. C. Richards is such a book.

I am working on a MLA at UNC-A. In a recent class we were studying Black Mountain College, where Richards taught. I was required to read her book; otherwise, I would not have made its acquaintance since I am neither a potter nor a poet. However, when I noticed the foreword in the anniversary edition was written by Matthew Fox, my interest was piqued. (The book was written in 1966. The 1983 update left the text unchanged, other than Richard’s comments in an introduction.) I soon discovered that M. C. Richards and I are "soul mates:" We were born with the same understanding of reality, not taught, but known. We both comprehended life as energy, and as magic:

From the beginning I have believed the world an amazing place, full of marvels…everything shone with improbability and magic…I was born to be happy, of this I had no doubt.(135) Once we know in our flesh that the world is imbued throughout with formative energy, we begin to experience how alive the world is, the air is, the earth is, we are. How full of possibilities. Once we begin to grasp how illusory are our certainties and uncertainties, we can begin to enjoy our doubts as symptoms in the process of knowledge.(115) …character moves within matter. Different bodies of energy live within man…(50) These "bodies" lie within each other like transparencies…one’s inner life, one’s spirit, is as specific, as palpable and material, as the shape of one’s hair. The "I am" that one says to oneself is as concrete as the circulation of one’s blood…the soul hungers for understanding, the body hungers for levitation, the spirit hungers for light."(51)

When I was a child, raised Catholic, I was asked by a friend of my mother’s what I thought God looked like. I replied, "God is energy. We all are energy, and when we die we go back to that energy." My mother, aghast, asked where I heard that. I said, "I don’t know, but I know it’s true."

I told my husband this belief when we met. He was agnostic, but came to accept this understanding of reality through various readings I brought home over the years. When I was twenty-eight, I experienced a past-life regression. I told the hypnotist I did not care about past-lives, but wanted him to ask me why I was here now: What was my purpose in this life?

When he asked me this under hypnosis, I saw a white, burning light that transformed into a glowing silver-white robe, worn by an old woman with pure white hair and intense blue eyes. Her wrinkled face smiled in beatific joy and she said, "Be light." The hypnotist badgered me as to what I was seeing. I could not answer, so entranced was I in her radiance. (Up to that point, I had been telling him all that I was seeing in my past life vision). As the woman faded away, I understood she was me, my higher self. He brought me out of the trance and asked what I had seen. I told him. He asked what it meant. I did not know. In later years, I learned through my readings that she had commanded me to express my knowledge of what we are to others, to be a light of understanding to the energy and connectedness that we all manifest.

We are not alone in that knowledge. On a spirit level, we all relate to this enlightenment. We are evolving as a species to recognize it as the center of our creativity, of our ability to change ourselves, to change man, to change the world in which we exist, to change our universe.  M. C. Richards says, "In physics, matter is immaterial. The physical world, it turns out, is invisible, inaudible, immeasurable, supersensible, and unpredictable….The birth of the new entails the death of the old, change: and yet the old does not literally die, it lives on, transformed."(11)

Not long ago I saw the movie, What the Bleep Do We Know? It is a sleigh-ride into our connection, into consciousness, into matter, into quantum physics, into the understanding that confirms my belief. It is exactly what Richards is trying to teach us (or reach) on a spiritual level: We are all one. As an organism, what we do in our existence effects everything. What we believe, what we feel, how we think—thoughts are things—how "turned-on and tuned-in" we are matters to the whole of our reality and our universe. It is the Hundredth Monkey in action.

Centering is not a process of inner study, it is an interaction of the "all-that-is," of the totality of life on earth and in the heavens. When we understand this connection, we realize our ability to transform our world and all we encounter. Richards, adds:

"When the sense of life in the individual is in touch with the life-power of the universe, is turning with it, he senses himself as potentially whole…the very rhythms of our breathing are the dialogue of inner and outer…we must embrace our world in all its daily happenings and details."(24)… Centering consciousness…plays dynamically in the tides of inner and outer, self and other, in an instinctive hope toward wholeness.(xx)  We have to be passionate…to let the intensity…live in our bodies…steady enough in ourselves, to be open to let the winds of life blow through us…The creative spirit creates with whatever materials are present. With food, with children,…with speech, with thoughts…(12) The more alive and quieter we are, the better we hear, the better we read. This is meditation. As we listen to each other… reality… transcends our previous likes and dislikes. Perception has altered the quality of our consciousness…As consciousness heightens, the moral sense evolves. We learn to be human beings through studying nature and man.(107)

In reading M.C. Richards I hear the echoes of my previous ten years of writing for Unity News and Views. She expresses so well what I know and what I have been trying to share all of my life with others. In reading her work, I came face-to-face with who I am.