“Fire in the Belly”

In the beginning, clay met fire.

Before there were kilns, there were fire circles. And before that — flame itself.

Not in a kiln — those came later — but in open pits and embers, where smoke curled into sky and wet earth hardened into memory. Fire wasn’t just a tool in ancient pottery. It was a presence.

Across time, fire meant transformation: soft clay became strong. Ash fell, glaze bloomed. In Persia, Japan, and First Nations fire pits, heat was instinctive, sacred — not programmed.

And it gathered people. Around the fire: stories, tea, silence.

This week in our ceramic studio in Abbotsford, we installed a pot belly stove. It isn’t a kiln. It’s not a digital heater. It’s something deeper: a cast-iron heart in the middle of our creative space.

We are warming our hands. Boiling tea. Standing too close. People are bringing stacks of wood, collecting them from friends in the country to share with us, and we are becoming friends. My husband is carrying wood into us in the mornings on his way to work. Andy arrives and lights the fire for the rest of us to come to.

The stove gives more than heat — it brings presence. It transforms the room and our connection to one another, and it reflects pottery rituals as old as clay itself.

Even now, in a modern pottery studio, the fire continues its quiet work: drawing us close to one another and to the ancient heat that still lives in our vessels.