If it is serendipity that lights your way through life, you will really take to Raku firing. The element of surprise comes with every firing, every individual pot. Where ceramic-kiln firing aspires for technical control to perfect your results, Raku offers you the excellence of imperfection.

To fire your raku pots, you first dip your bisque pots in glaze and stand them on a bed of bricks. Next, cover your pots with a metal rubbish bin whose insides have been lined with asbestos, and then insert a gas-burning hose through a narrow opening in the brick bed
to fire your pot. When the pots glow red-hot, you lift the bin up and immediately pick up your pots with metal tongs and stuff them into a second bin filled with leaves or paper. Quickly close the lid to deprive the red-hot pots of oxygen as the leaves or paper burn and fill with smoke. This allows the metallic elements in the glaze, such as copper and oxides, to surface and produce iridescent effects.

You never really know how the colors will turn out, or where metallic patches may surface. If you are blest by your guardian angel, you have a magnificent pot, even if the iridescence is not permanent and dulls over the years. What a high you get when you lift your pot from the smoke-filled bin, dip it in cold water, and as you rub the soot out, slowly discover the results of your efforts, —sometimes wondrous, sometimes disastrous.

In bushfire-prone Sydney, it's a hazard to fire raku-style outdoors. I can't do this in my own backyard, so in the past I simply relied on the community arts center. As far as I know only one teacher taught and organized these firings once a year on a day when the bush fire department approved, and that magnificent lady (God bless her) has now gone to Canberra. So sadly, raku is not something I can do on my own.

Whenever I dream of paradise, I imagine it as God's backyard where raku firing is play, and play is prayer.