Act
Bryan Ohno
On a warm sunny day, a few springs ago, we were playing with our twin grandchildren under a tall Douglas Fir tree. We gathered the cones and piled them up into a mound. They ran around the yard and gathered as many as they could. They shared and laughed with joy. We were saying to ourselves, “This is beautiful, sharing and making things together, how splendid.” So we decided to get a bucket to put the cones in for another occasion to play in the house. Boy, did everything turned upside down after that. Somehow the minute the cones left the earth, the act of going into a basket transformed them into a commodity. The sentiment of, “here you go,” switched to, “It’s mine.” What happened here? Is this the innate trait within all of us? It must be. How else can you explain a one year old who can barely utter words, can so distinctively switch into these modes of behavior? Our immediate thought was to put everything back on the ground, and so we did. The fight stopped. When we feel connected to mother earth, could our visceral nature be is to share? Is this is our natural state? The other is our fear playing tricks with us? Doing pottery to us is keeping that gate way open to reground ourselves frequently. It enables us not to forget the virtue of sharing. Bryan Ohno is the co-founder of Soos Creek Studio, a ceramic studio in the City of Kent. The studio creates sustainable-use pottery and trains youth to be the next generation of potters in the community. He also ran two fine art galleries in Tokyo and Seattle and was the founding director of MadArt.Browse all performers