Jar: A Love Story

Made of mountains and our own ingenuity, the jar is a symbol of what is and what’s possible

I’m on a plane, a thousand or so miles away from home. But on my mind is an unassuming jar, vintage, blue glass, gifted to me by a friend in exchange for a jar of hot sauce long since consumed. 

On this flight, I’ve been watching the in-flight entertainment, namely Amy Tan’s masterclass on writing, allowing myself to be pulled through thought exercises and her experiences as I consider how to deepen my own writing practice. 

When she discussed developing one’s voice as a writer, I found myself plunging into a frenzy of words, journaling about what mattered to me as a writer. I wondered what, of all objects in the world, might embody the distilled essence of my writing practice, of my identity as a creator? What contained an identity of its own, while allowing for the capacity of creativity and space for the not-yet-imagined?

My mind turned to the jar on my shelf, one of hundreds in my house, any of them would work here, but my mind settled on the blue jar, a symbol of sharing and community in my own life. 

Why a love story to a jar?

The glass speaks of ancient truths, of mountains ground to sand, their stories broken apart like a sunbeam through a crystal, then reconfigured and combined with other mountains. Other stories. Other histories. All to create this object with its own collective and personal history separate from the histories it’s built from. 

When we create with this jar, we use old mountains to build new ones. 

Here, as we preserve, or eat and drink, or store, or watch our ferments transform before our eyes, we fill this jar with nourishment and memories. 

Each time it’s emptied, we’re made aware of the possibilities it contains. 

Like Bee Wilson’s fork, our jar contains the stories of those than came before it, from the invention of the glass canning jar itself, to the discovery of glass and its eventual industrial production, to the countless vessels made and used over the millennia that preceded our jar but ultimately inform its shape and function. 

This is why, in The Hidden Cosmos, “The Jar” was the only card I created as a rough approximation of one found in a traditional tarot deck. Here, The Jar represents The World, both full of presence and possibility all at once. 

With our jar, we take this culmination of thousands of vessels, and add to it our own culmination. 

Each time we create something by hand, we are adding our hands to the lineage of hands that have fed families, built homes, and otherwise crafted a life grounded in our actions, our skills, and our ability to make imagination reality. 

When we add our creations to our jar, we add our own perspective and skills to this lineage: another rock in the mountain of skills and traditions we pass on in our own personal experience. 

Here, we become the bridge between ancestors and the future.

And, together with our jar, we build a new mountain: one that combines our own story with the collective story of eating and drinking, of filling and emptying vessels, and of the creation of vessels themselves.

It’s a mountain full of presence and possibilities all at once. 

—

This was written and illustrated in three parts during three legs of an unexpectedly long airport journey. 

Draft 1 was written on my first flight from Anchorage to Seattle. It was illustrated on flight # 2 to Salt Lake City, and finally edited and uploaded at the gate for the final leg home to Atlanta. 

It’s messy, and sleepless, and magical, but so is life. 

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