People of clay…me

I’m going to write again. Not about how to hang a lamp so Google will like it. Not about visitors, likes or conversion rates. But the way I’ve always written. About what moves. About what shifts something inside you. Years ago I wrote about my breast cancer. About riding a motorcycle from the Netherlands to the south of Spain. About wandering through Andalusia. I write for the same reason I make ceramics. To understand. To feel. To offer a different angle. To create movement, even if it’s small.
I don’t know yet how often I’ll write. And not everything I write will land the same way with you. That’s fine.
I’ve passed fifty. I’ll come back to that another time.
First, I want to take you to a moment a little over four years ago.
We were on holiday in our house in Andalusia. It was November. Light softer, days quieter. And somewhere in between doing nothing and everything, I said to my husband:
“I think I’m staying.”
So I packed a few extra clothes. And I stayed.He went back alone.
The first weeks blurred into months, filled with visits from friends. Long conversations, shared meals, laughter echoing through a house that wasn’t quite lived in yet.
But underneath it, something kept pulling.
A quiet, persistent knowing: I need something to do.
“Why don’t you turn those stables into your ceramics studio?” my husband said one day.
I must have looked at him like he’d lost his mind.
The entire ceiling of the floor above was brought down when we build a new floor. It lay scattered on the ground. Half a meter high. Sixty square meters of rubble.
I started. Every day, I filled five wheelbarrows. Moved the rubble somewhere else. No big plan. No end date. Just five wheelbarrows.
When my husband came back, there was one piece left. One stubborn chunk I couldn’t break.
He looked at it and said, almost casually:
“Well… then you might as well plaster the walls too.
“I’ve never plastered before.”
“It’s like clay. If I can do it, so can you.”
He showed me once. And left again. Leaving me with a few bags of capa fino, a trowel, and a bucket.
And so I worked. Every day, an hour and a half. Not more. Not less.
I plastered the ceiling.Then the walls. Bought more bags.Kept going.
Until one day, it was done. 
Strangely, it never felt like I was working incredibly hard. But somewhere along the way, piece by piece, something big had taken shape. We laid the floors together.
And then, finally, my ceramics tools arrived.
That’s how it began.
The clay hut was born.