The Potter’s Wheel

An Astrological Framework for Sanity

The first bowl I ever tried to throw collapsed in my hands.

I was fourteen. The wheel was spinning too fast because I didn’t know how to slow it down, and the clay kept buckling under my thumbs. My instructor stood behind me and said, almost casually, “You’re not centering it. You’re fighting it.”

I remember feeling irritated by that. I wasn’t fighting anything. I was trying very hard. But that was exactly the problem. I was trying to shape something that wasn’t stable yet. The clay wobbled because I was wobbling. The wheel didn’t care.

It took months before I understood what centering actually meant. Not force. Not finesse. Even pressure. Both hands working against each other while the wheel spun beneath them. When the clay finally locked onto the axis, you could feel it. The wobble disappeared. The resistance softened. The same speed that had felt violent suddenly felt usable.

I think about that often when I look at how people use astrology.

For years, I used it to track events. Then to understand personality. Then to anticipate crisis. I chased good transits. I braced for difficult ones. I’ve watched others do the same — refreshing charts the way people refresh weather apps, trying to time their lives into safety. It can become exhausting. You can turn astrology into a sophisticated way of worrying.

But astrology is not the weather.

It’s the wheel.