This week I found myself walking through the lavender carrying three pottery bowls in my arms.

The first blossoms had begun to open, and each morning the field seemed to awaken a little more. The bees had returned now, moving patiently from flower to flower, asking nothing of the day except to participate in it.

The bowls were waiting to be wrapped as a birthday gift for someone I care about and for her two daughters.

It should have felt like a simple moment.

Instead, I stopped. A thought arrived so quietly that I almost missed it. I don’t think I have created art as a gift for someone I care about in a very long time.

I stood there in the lavender, holding those bowls and reflecting on how beautiful it felt to create for those we love.

Giving has always been one of the deepest joys of my life. I love preparing meals for people I care about. I have tried to give through leadership, through raising four beautiful children, and through friendship and kindness by creating spaces and places where other people could flourish.

Somewhere in my teenage years I stopped making art.

As a child, I loved sketching, woodworking, and drawing. Creating came naturally. Somehow, without ever deciding to, that part of me slowly disappeared beneath adulthood. Beneath a life of performance. A life of doing.

Now I find myself living a life where I am able to simply be. To feel. To respond to inspiration and dreams.

Looking back, I don’t think I lost the artist or creative within me. I simply stopped giving her space to speak.

The bowls themselves began with a dream.

One night I dreamed I was arriving at a birthday celebration carrying pottery I had made as a gift. The dream was so vivid that it stayed with me long after I woke up. There was only one problem.

I had never touched a pottery wheel.

The dream wasn’t symbolic. It was an invitation. A calling of sorts.

A dear friend and I booked a pottery lesson together. I was, quite honestly, a disaster on the wheel.

Then one morning I woke up with a simple thought.

I learn by doing.

So I began.

The clay didn’t care that I had never done this before. It wasn’t asking me to be talented. It asked only that I be present, to my hands, to my breath, to the gentle pressure of my fingertips, to my heart. Slowly the first bowl began to emerge. Then another. Then another.

Those first three bowls became the gift from my dream.

A few days later I shared the story with a dear friend, a former research scientist whose other great passion has always been wine making. For more than twenty-five years he has tended vines here in Prince Edward County, creating award-winning wines with extraordinary care, patience and love. He understands that true craft is never simply about technique. It is about love. About devotion. About offering something of yourself through your work.

When I told him about the bowls, he smiled.

He said that in many ancient cultures, and among many Indigenous peoples, love and appreciation were often expressed through art, through the things people created with the fullness of their heart and soul.

Something inside me became still.

I wasn’t learning something new.

I was remembering.

Something old.

Something true.

Something forgotten, but never gone.

As I continued walking through the lavender, I realised something else.

I wasn’t wondering whether they would like the bowls. I felt joy in having created something from love, for someone whose presence and way of being inspires me.

The gift had already been given.

It had been given in the quiet mornings at the pottery wheel. It had been given each time I centred the clay. Each time I began again. Each time I imagined the hands that would one day hold those bowls.

The bowls were simply what remained.

I have carried that thought with me ever since.

Perhaps we have forgotten something. Not how to make art, but how deeply beautiful it is to create art for another human being, for humanity and for our world.

A lovingly prepared meal. A handwritten letter. A knitted blanket. A quilt. A song. A painting. A bowl.

None of them begin as masterpieces. They begin as inspiration. As love.

As I have sat with this over the past week, I have begun to wonder if art was never really about mastery at all.

Perhaps, like the flower, love simply longs to express itself.

For me, art is what love looks like when it is allowed to express itself.

When we create from the truest place within us, our soul quietly finds its way into expression.