Surrender to the fire

This summer, I had the joy of reconnecting with one of my favorite people.

When I first met Patty, she had set aside her art career to run an outsourcing firm for tech companies—and she gave me my very first job out of college. I still remember walking into the interview and seeing her sitting in a high-backed velvet purple chair that emphasized her diminutive size. But that first impression was deceiving. Years later, when I looked back on that time, I no longer saw a tiny woman in a big chair. I saw a queen on a purple throne—someone who held the rare power that comes from truly seeing another person.

She saw both my light and my shadow: the weight of my father’s fears and my mother’s sadness, my longing to distance myself from the magnetic pull of Silicon Valley in the ’90s, the call of faraway places, the searching—and a shared love of a certain small dog breed.

There was space for all of it with Patty. And complete acceptance. She saw my possibility long before I could. And because someone as magical as this woman on her purple throne believed in me—and more profoundly, believed in life itself—I began to trust that the path would rise up to meet me. That my uniqueness had a place. That I could trust its unfolding.

This kind of “seeing” is the greatest gift we can offer a young person. When things get tough with my older daughter, or I’m simply exasperated with my younger one, I remind myself of Patty’s gift. It holds the answer to so much of what we’re seeking as parents—and what our children need.

For over 30 years now, Patty has returned to her art—creating signature ceramic Goddesses. Her gift of sight exquisitely imbues clay with the pain, struggle, and beauty of women’s journeys. During our visit, she told me about her trip to Japan, where she was learning indigo block printing. I could picture her mischievous smile as she described tossing aside the printing blocks and choosing instead to knot and tie the fabric. She wanted the unexpected, not the predictable. She said she’d choose the magic of surprise over the perfection of form any day.

Her ceramic goddesses are Raku-fired—a process where beauty emerges not just from intention, but from surrender. The artist chooses the glaze, the temperature, the timing. But what makes the piece alive is everything that can’t be controlled: the cracks, the smoke, the fire, the flaws in the material, even the presence of other pieces in the kiln.

As she spoke, I felt tears rising—not just from love for her, but from the deep resonance of her story in my own journey.

So much of life—our relationships, our work, especially our children—we try to mold and manage. We measure our worth by how closely outcomes match our expectations. But what if we approached our lives like the Raku artist does? Brave. Curious. Willing to co-create with the unknown.

What if we trusted that wholeness can come from the unexpected, and that beauty often lives inside what we once thought were mistakes?

We can still take inspired action. We choose our glaze. We time the fire. And then—we let go.

And the magic happens.

Thank you, Patty, for seeing me all those years

ago—and for the artist, and teacher, you continue to be.