On June 9, 2026, Susan Siegel and Saundra Thomas were checking the Zoom transcription function on a computer as I joined the meeting to be transcribed. 

I asked Saundra how she was doing. “I’m just toggling a lot of things,” she said, referring to things in her life, not on the computer.

Toggling … that electronics term is entering vernacular speech. The original "toggle" was a physical hardware (“on or off”) switch and the meaning expanded to include switching back and forth between two programs or tasks. 

This migration of tech jargon into everyday conversation could be another small sign (among many) that we are living in a Matrix-like VR, some might surmise. The surreal quality of today’s world provides a plausible context for this conjecture. Or, at least, are we becoming more mechanical like our omnipresent devices?  

The transcription function was working and Saundra left the room.

My musings about tech jargon migration and digital simulation quickly dissolved. As Susan and I plunged into conversation, it became clear that she and Saundra live a life so deeply rooted in the physical, natural world that it shattered any illusion of the virtual.

Earth Mama

Susan Siegel is such a “down-to-earth” person, that unless you know her well, it hard to fathom the depth of her achievement and breadth of her worldliness. Outgoing, open-minded, bubbly, easily approachable, no facades, keenly interested in you whoever you are, and literally down (as well as in terms of personality), she’s Brooklyn-based ceramicist who keeps a foldable shovel in her bag.

On the drive from the airport to her vacation home in Hopkins Village, Belize, along the roadside, where the earth runs red and mineral-rich, she stops the car, gets out, and digs up wild clay. In April 2026, she scavenged red clay and sand from the site of a former plantation in Alabama into one of her pieces, mindful that DNA traces of the enslaved could reside within it.

And her work is elemental in the most literal sense. The elements that she works with — wood, fire, water, air, and clay have, she will tell you, “things to say, if you know how to listen.”

The listening began with sticks in 1977 when she was 17 and went to Arizona from her hometown of Pomona, a suburb of New York City, which she referred to as “the epitome of mediocrity — I wanted to get far away from that place.”

In Arizona, under the influence of psilocybin mushrooms, Susan found herself in conversation with three particular sticks lying on the canyon floor. The first carried the hard edge geometry of a businessman with skin patterned like a Mondrian painting. The second flowed like a line of mountain woman. The third had deep fissures like a troubled child.

Stretching across four states, the Grand Canyon National Park is ancestral homeland for 11 ethnicities including the Hopi, Navajo and Zuni. The natural grandeur and sacred feeling of that place was very powerful to young Susan. A shaman later told her that in a past life, she had been a leader on the Trail of Tears. “I kept those sticks in a box for many years,” she says. (Susan, what happened to those sticks? Did you include them in some kind of pot or ritual?

Susan Siegel majored in art and special education in college and taught hearing impaired, emotionally disturbed, and learning-disabled children in New York City. The work was very rewarding because the benefits for the children were directly observable.

Siegel’s career course changed, however, when she was 25 and had a chance to travel with a friend through East and West Africa including Kenya, Mali, Burkina Faso, Senegal and Ivory Coast. In Abidjan, she encountered men, with polio, dragging themselves through the street outside a supermarket on muscled arms and withered legs yet their eyes and smiles were penetrating. She returned to New York unable to stop thinking about them.

When Siegel returned home, she wrote her first grant application and it was funded. She proposed to establish an artisan center for the physically handicapped in Ivory Coast, where they could learn a marketable skill and earn a living.The following summer she was back in Abidjan, knocking on the doors of the World Bank, the African American Bank, and various embassies to supplement the grant funds.

As a way to connect to African artisans, Siegel joined up with a Parsons College trip that brought American artists and educators to apprentice Ivorian artisans. They visited batik, lost wax casting, indigo dyeing, basketry, weaving and pottery villages. (Susan, I didn’t mention the Vogels here because that’s an interesting part of the story you can tell in account more geared to the art world.)

That’s how Susan found herself in the Baoulé village of Tanousakassou, under the guidance of N’na, the chief of the pottery collective, and the woman she would come to think of as her African mother. The other Americans left after three weeks. Siegel stayed two years. “I found myself under the spell of N’na,” she says.

She fully integrated into the community by learning the Baulé language and doing manual labor rather than remaining a special guest .

“There was something that called out to me, and I listened, and I just knew I needed to stay there,” Spiegel recalls. I wanted to become part of the rhythm of daily life. Like, when we went to the fields, I wanted to dig, and they were like, no, it's too hard!

No, I want to work the fields, I want to work the crops!”

At the end of a hard day's work,’ villagers would ask to see Susan’s hands that were blistered from the rough work.

At this time, 1986, rural Africa was still cut off from the rest of the world in a way that irrevocably changed with the advent of cell phones.

“The kids that were four years old and wanted to hold my hands and walk with me when I went to poop in the in the fields,” she also recalls. “They wanted to see how a white girl poops.”

Siegel’s first pottery making tools were a stick and a stone. She learned to coil pots the way the Baoulé women had always made them.

The men dug heavy clay rocks from ditches in the surrounding fields and loaded them into metal bowls. The women including Susan, lifted the bowls onto their heads and walked them back into the village in regal, straight-backed, single-file,

Children pounded the clay into fine red sand with pestles. The women added water, wedged the clay into balls and crafted the vessels.

The villagers had built massive clay ovens/kilns the size of small houses or yurts to fire the clay. Lacking electricity or fossil fuels, they meticulously layered clay pots with collected firewood. The process required sleeping around the kiln all night to keep the fires stoking at maximum heat, ensuring the clay reached temperatures high enough to permanently transform mud into durable utensils.

In the compound courtyard, three generations of family lived surrounded by clay in the most literal sense. The cooking hearths were sculpted from it. And each day N’na and her daughters repainted the hearth surfaces with a fresh coat clay. “Imagine cleaning with mud!” Siegel exclaims.

The family cooked in the clay pots, drank from the cups, and ate from a communal plate shaped by the hands of the women.

The villagers’ spirituality was also malleable. “There was a little church in the village where they had the drumming and the clapping and they're talking about Jesus.” When Susan inquired about the Christian mix in the traditional practice, they explained: “It's just another good God to pray to. You never know. It brought us some good things.”

Susan’s happiest days ended bathing with a warm bucket of water and a sponge.

Meanwhile, she was also commuting back and forth between the village and Abidjan to form the cooperative of artisans with disabilities. “They joined me at many meetings and presentations with funders. We finally raised the capital for the Artisan Center, and with the help of an architect friend, were able to develop the plans to construct a building and realize a dream.”

There’s also a romantic love element in the pottery village story that Siegel tells in her full memoir. (Susan, the Ecollective article can be part of a strategy for you to get a book or movie contract to tell your story.)

After two years Siegel carried the Baoulé cultural inheritance back home to New York. Now when she now feeds her clay surfaces by pressing corn, lentils, rice, and beans into it, she is not decorating. In a ritual of offering, she is feeding the earth’s bounty back to itself.

Siegel entered NYU’s Gallatin Division, a school for self-directed students who design their own course of study and earned a Masters degree in ethnographic film and global education.

Her thesis was on how artistic expression is integrated into the lives of the Baoulé people. An accompanying exhibition featured her batiks, photographs, and ceramics, along with a documentary film she titled Mwala CnBa: “I left for a while but now I’m back.”

Susan Siegel went on to found Global Action Project, a nonprofit that trained young people to make films on social issues and use them as tools for community dialogue and action. GAP produced more than forty films; the Global Kids (?) organization it seeded ran for 30 years before ending in 2019.

One of the Global Kids became a Susan and Saundra mentee, a teenager whose mother was from the Caribbean. The girl and her mother lived in public housing in a foul-smelling area next to the city’s sewage treatment plant. The housing project had been built in this urban outpost because poor people were too disempowered to advocate for themselves. (Susan, I remember hearing about Maricela’s housing and then thinking like the progressive people who voted for Mamdani and his picks for Congress. Even though NYC is liberal and reliably votes Democratic, there still problems that will be endemic until we imagine new approaches to big city management and have the patience required to be able to help implement those means.)

Siegel’s growing sense of environmental injustice helped propel her back into the natural world and she launched a farmer’s market and a community garden.

As an inveterate "‘go getter,’ she also raised funds for a school library serving bright young men of color. And she opened Brooklyn ARTery, a gift shop and arts space in her Ditmus neighborhood of Brooklyn and on Governors Island.

It was a dear friend, Sylvia, who finally gave her the language she needed. Syl’s insight was, in effect, articulated like this:  “You are a start-up entrepreneur. Filling niches no one else sees. Building the foundation and releasing it. Thriving on the chase.‍” ‍

Recognizing her final calling of multiple callings, Susan gave up her juggling (toggling) work style and came fully home to clay.

The Brooklyn-based “Village”

Susan Siegel’s above-mentioned “dear friend” is the noted designer Sylvia Harris (1953-2011). Sylvia was a member of an interconnected group of friends called “the Village” that includes Susan Siegel and Saundra Thomas. The Village is based is Brooklyn but stretches out to encompass Daniel and Marcia Minter, co-founding directors of the Indigo Arts Alliance in Portland. Maine.

In resonance with her incorporating beads and natural materials into clay vessels and giving ritual purpose, Siegel gathered a community of friends to create beads for Daniel Minter’s commissioned public installation sculpture on the grounds of Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens. “Daniel talked with us about his intention for the work, then we joined together and put our hands and hearts in the clay!”

The project “The Voice of Trees” is a large freestanding sculpture using native trees, bound together, inspired by the African proverb, “ Sticks in a bundle are unbreakable.” The trees were “strung with hundreds of clay beads each representing the hopes and prayers we have for generations to come.”

View “The Voice of the Trees” in this Ecollective article on Minter, “Making the unseen seen and replenishing the seen.”‍ ‍(Susan, I’m having to re-format this article on Daniel that shows the installation you worked on but that work will be completed by the time this article on you is posted.)

Coming full circle: the Belize home and studio

The present looped back to reflect the past when Susan Siegel and Saundra Thomas built an ocean front home in Hopkins Village, Belize. From the start, this Garifuna Village, populated by decedents of enslaved Africans, felt like home.

Working with an architect and contractor, they designed an ideal, integrated space where Susan can "float" between her work, domestic life, and the sea.

The compound features central "Story Garden,” a courtyard the architect named after the owners' narrative-rich lives.

The house was built entirely around the existing landscape, saving roughly 35 native trees from being cut down. The contractor has since added more full-sized trees.

Susan uses the sun in the Story Garden to dry pieces quickly and intends to utilize the space to build massive sculptural totems and functional plant vessels.

Living beside the ocean, she can walk the beach and collect sticks. And, as true in many agricultural areas, lighting fires in Belize is often practiced as a means of managing crops and recycling nutrients back into the soil. It is quite common to see the rising smoke and small fires while driving along Belizean farmlands, or in peoples’ yards, as a way to dispose their trash.

Susan had been doing mini pit fires in her backyard BBQ appliance in Brooklyn to create surfaces that are earthy and natural. Now she can perform real pit fires in her Belize yard. Dating back over 30,000 years, pit fires bring out the natural elements of the clay. Carbon trapping caused by smoke and minerals surround the pottery, and the wood, sawdust and oxides create natural decorative black, grey, red and orange stains.

“

The Metaphysics of Closure: Completing the Vessel with the Living World

Siegel seals the openings of her vessels with sticks, vines, gourds, natural fibers, stones, and clay beads she makes herself. She weaves through the carved windows of her cylindrical forms with materials gathered from beaches, roadsides and markets off the beaten path. The physical act of closing her pieces with these earth-gathered elements is, she explains, simultaneously a metaphysical one: a connection to the ground, the earth and a completion of what clay alone cannot finish. The vessel becomes whole only when the living world is brought inside it.

Susan on Her Own Enacted Spirituality

When pressed to define her spiritual framework, Susan concluded that her practice is entirely action-oriented rather than academic or theological:

My spirituality is the way that I live. It doesn't come from my head at all. It comes from my heart, and it just comes as a kind of an extension of my being... It's in my way of interacting with the world, with people, with nature, with everything. My connection to the spirit world is very rich and the clay is just another extension of that.

The return to the Ivory Coast

In month ____ year___ (?), Susan Siegel went back to the pottery village of Tanousakasou, accompanied by Saundra Thomas.

“As an expression of gratitude, Saundra and I funded a ceramic exhibition space in the village,” says Susan. “We returned for the joyful opening, where hundreds gathered to celebrate with drumming, speeches and dancing.”

Susan and Saundra hope that the modern show room will provide the pottery collective more room to create and to develop business relationships that will result in selling more work and improving the economy in the village. 

“It was so unbelievably powerful!” Susan says referring to her wam welcome after a 37-year gap. “Susan, I remember you!,” the older people shouted with delight.

One of them was a man who told Susan about coming to the village with his baby to show her to his mother and Susan’s adoptive mother, N’na, the chief of pottery.

“And you took my baby, held her in your arms, and you said, Sandra!”

“Your daughter's name is Sandra?,” asked Susan.

“And he said, ‘yes, she's here, she's 37 years old’!

Then his Sandra met Saundra Thomas which Susan says is a “crazy” coincidence.

(Susan, this account might need some tweaking because it’s kinda confusing. Did you name the baby, Sandra?)

Susan continued to recall the ‘crazy’ encounter: “And he said, and ‘she kept your picture. She had a photo of you, and I remember once it got a very oily red sauce on it. She ripped apart the part that had the sauce, and she kept your face in her pocket, and I knew she loved you.”

As I got on the bus and I looked through the window, we were both sobbing.

The villagers were still living in a very simple manner with no electricity in mud huts. But there's a lot more cement, people have cell phone and some of the potters are now men.

(Susan, photo captions can help tell this story of the return visit.)

Arriving unexpectedly as the most natural and necessary thing to do

Back in the day when people still sent letters by snail mail, Susan made cylindrical form with a funnel opening, carved a sinuous snakelike opening into its surface, and set the pot on her windowsill.

Then came a painful breakup.

Susan stuffed the pot with mail from her former lover, sat on the floor with it between her legs, set the contents on fire.

As the love letters crumbled into ash, she cried out the flames with her tears.

She planted his small cactus plant in the ashes and did not water it for weeks.

When the cactus died, she wove the top closed with natural fiber, found the snake-shaped piece removed from the pot and sealed it back into place.

The closing was both physical and spiritual and her first pot ritual.

Studio snapshot and soundscape

When she’s in her studio, Susan Siegel listens to African, Cuban, jazz and hip hop that gets her “in the zone for creation,” she says. “I envision viewers wearing headphones and listening to the same beats while they take in my pieces.”

Sometimes the music get her into a trancelike state and conjures up the ritual that she visualizes for someone with the pot in their home.

“For example, my piece, Six Wishes. I envision that they have six wishes that they want to actualize. Maybe they project them on to each of those spheres in their mind and use the piece as a vehicle for manifesting those desires, whether personal, spiritual or political.  They can return to the piece, perhaps on an altar, and focus on their desires, working toward manifestation.”

Field work, materials science and chemistry … and alchemy

Some casual observers may dismiss pottery as a simple "craft" but we delved into the chemistry and physics of the medium and a timeless dimension of alchemy, not just the midieval quest to turn base metals into gold.

Susan works in two studios because she has two homes: main home in Brooklyn; vacation home in Belize. Three to four times a week, she works at Powerhouse Arts, on the 6th floor of a Brooklyn building with magnificent floor-to-ceiling arched windows that flood the space with natural light.

Susan’s almost lifelong fascination with hunting for wild clay begins with identifying the right kind of terrain, digging up terrains that are often mixed with strips of “organic” dirt (from decaying vegetation and sand) and wild clay, and grinding the clay rocks down.

Raw clay rocks must undergo extensive testing. Susan evaluates elasticity, firing survival and natural coloration. She often has to alter the composition by adding elements like feldspar, silica, or commercial clay bodies to ensure stability.

She rejects shiny, commercial glazes in favor of highly tactile, organic, and raw surfaces. So she relies heavily on raw mineral powders and metal oxides (black iron oxide, cobalt, chromium) which she views as painting with the raw elements of the earth.

Pieces must air-dry to a hard state for carving and refining before their first "bisque" firing. And pieces are repeatedly fired, sometimes a dozen times, layering various oxide and glaze combinations until the precise depth of surface texture is achieved.

Pottery is, by definition, an alchemical art form. Classical alchemy is about the transformation of prime matter into a perfected state through the four elements. The potter’s wheel is a crucible where this happens:

The raw clay (earth) must be lubricated with water. Too much water, and it dissolves; too little, and the friction of the torsion will tear it apart. The potter balances these to make the earth malleable.

A physics of contemporary alchemy

One of the sources of inspirations for considering the torsion physics of Susan Siegel’s pottery-making is spiritual teacher Rupert Spira’s philosophy associated with the potter’s wheel. Spira often speaks of the wheel as a metaphor for the unmoving consciousness around which the dance of form takes place.

In Siegel’s practice, this spiritual centering manifests as a literal mastery over kinetic energy, where the boundary between material mechanics and cosmic geometry blurs.

Because Spira was a renowned studio ceramicist before transitioning to teaching non-duality full-time, his spiritual insights are shaped by the literal mechanics of throwing clay.

When he uses the wheel as a metaphor for consciousness, he is drawing a direct parallel between the physical art of centering clay and the spiritual practice of locating pure awareness:

On a spinning potter’s wheel, the “still point” is the exact geometric center that is perfectly stationary while everything around it moves at high speed. Spira uses this to describe awareness (or consciousness) as the unmoving, changeless witness that remains still while the chaotic "dance of form" (thoughts, emotions, and sensory experiences) spins rapidly around it.

He frequently notes that a potter uses kinetic rotation to shape an empty space, famously stating that a bowl's potency lies in its capacity to evoke the "infinite reality" of the void it contains. In his later years as a potter, he even began scratching his non-dual poetry directly into the glazes of his open wheel-thrown bowls, a practice he described as a literal transition into "making bowls out of words." 

The topological and torsion forces at play on a potter's wheel share a geometric relationship with those creating whirlpools in water and celestial black holes.

As the potter’s wheel spins, the centrifugal effect pushes the clay outward. The potter’s hands provide the centripetal force, pushing the clay back inward to keep it centered.

When a potter "opens" a lump of clay and pulls the walls upward, the friction of the spinning wheel twists the clay. This introduces torsion (rotational stress).

In fluid dynamics, a smoke ring or a whirlpool creates a torus, a self-organizing, circulating toroidal (doughnut shape) of energy where force flows in, rotates around, and cycles back out. When a potter begins shaping a vessel, especially when centering or opening a bowl, the clay and the kinetic energy moving through it physically trace this exact toroidal field.

A black hole or a draining whirlpool is a sink: energy spiraling inward toward a single point of singularity. A potter's wheel is actually the inverse: it is a generator. Energy radiates from the central axis outward, and the potter must master that outward flow. However, both rely on a stable, unmoving center (the axis of rotation) around which a chaotic mass becomes organized.

The transition from raw physics to metaphysics happens at the wheel's exact center.

In physics, the very center of a spinning wheel has a velocity of zero. It is the still point. For a potter, finding this absolute center is both a physical requirement and a meditative state. If the potter is not internally centered, the clay will wobble and collapse.

This mirrors the metaphysical concept of the “axis mundi” (the cosmic axis) or the "still point of the turning world." The “still point” also has a parallel in Buddhism which was relevant to Saundra’s one-week silent meditation at Spirit Rock in California in July 2026. (Susan, will Saundra be on retreat at Spirit Rock?)

So when Susan uses physical torsion to coaxial the clay into alignment with the invisible, metaphysical center, she is essentially using rotational kinetic energy to manifest an empty space (the interior of the pot) out of solid mass. As she pulls the clay into a hollow form, she is capturing air.

Medieval alchemy was based on a magically faux, red powder catalyst. In addition to toroidal hollow torsion, Susan’s contemporary alchemy includes vitrification (high-temperature firing) that transforms porous clay into a dense, rock-like, non-porous, glassy surface by melting the silica, locking the dynamic, spinning energy of the wheel into a solid, stone-like state in the kiln.

Susan, this physics and alchemy section is entirely optional and you may want to cut it. Just wanted to show you a possibility for evoking the alchemy enchantment. During our Zoom conversation, I referred to the centrifugal force aspect with this correlation to pottery in mind and previously, in one of my initial emails about this writing, I included a Rupert Spira link.

Pottery and ritual in Rachel Harding’s send off

“I think Rachel passed in a spiritual community that could help usher her into the world of the ancestors in a way that was right for her,” Susan says.

Susan and Saundra were at their Belize home when they heard that Harding had gone into hospice.

Susan dug up raw clay and hand-molded a small, unfired ceremonial vessel. She embedded seashells from their home’s ocean front into the vessel’s surface and stuffed it with palm leaves.

Saundra wrote a poem for Rachel which went into the vessel.

(Susan, if there’s a copy of the poem it can be inserted into this section.)

They placed a phone on the sand, broadcasting a recording of Rachel's own voice from a poetry podcast (Voices and Visions) so she could actively participate in her own transition. “We wanted her to there with us, and so we heard her voice.”

Susan and been introduced to Bahia, Brazil, through her artistic peers and had visited sacred terreiros (spiritual houses of Candomblé). She was deeply moved by the monumental ceramic vessels standing in the courtyards, adorned with specific spiritual symbology (such as seashell motifs honoring the sea deity (Yemanjá) utilized to hold sacred offerings of rice, water and corn.

Susan and Saundra lit the combustible contents of the vessel on fire, sitting with the smoke and flames at the water's edge.

“And then I put the (unfired) pot in the water,” Susan says.

“We watched the water come over it, and next to it, and around it and eventually take it back, in the same way that that would happen to Rachel's spirit and her soul being taken back to the earth.”

(Caption for image)

When Susan feeds her clay surfaces by pressing corn, lentils, rice, and beans into it, she is not decorating. In a ritual of offering, she is feeding the earth’s bounty back to itself.

Susan, we might show the nested bowl you made for Syl here.

Susan, here we can insert an image of your studio and a photo of the “Six Wishes” pot.

And to add another element to the article, we could also insert an audio (mp3) file with sampled excerpts from your playlist.