Mary Caroline Richards

Who was Mary Caroline Richards?

Mary Caroline Richards was an American poet, potter and writer, best known for her book Centering in Pottery, Poetry and the Person. Educated at Reed College, in Portland, Oregon, and at the University of California at Berkeley, she taught English at the Central Washington College of Education and the University of Chicago, but in 1945 became a faculty member of the notoriously experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina.

Later in life she taught art at the Institute in Culture and Creation Spirituality at Holy Names College. ICCS was founded by former Roman Catholic and current Episcopal priest Matthew Fox.

She was married in 1943 to Vernon Young, and secondly in 1945 to Bill Levi.

The correspondence between Mary Richards and James Herlihy is preserved at the University of Delaware Library.

She spent the list 15 years of her life living and working as a volunteer at Camphill Village Kimberton Hills, where she worked with residents with developmental disabilities and took up painting, and where the film “M.C. Richards: The Fire Within” was made. "Her art-of-many-genres wove together all her concerns, including community, agriculture, craft itself, and spiritual ideas.

Famous Quotes:

• It helps, I think, to consider ourselves on a very long journey: the main thing is to keep to the faith, to endure, to help each other when we stumble or tire, to weep and press on.
• It is for each of us freely to choose whom we shall serve, and find in that obedience our freedom.
• Let no one be deluded that a knowledge of the path can substitute for putting one foot in front of the other.
• Who are enemies? Those who oppose each others will.
• To have character is to be big enough to take life on.
• The imagination equips us to perceive reality when it is not fully materialized.
• Am I willing to give up what I have in order to be what I am not yet? Am I able to follow the spirit of love into the desert? It is a frightening and sacred moment. There is no return. One's life is charged forever. It is the fire that gives us our shape.
• It is part of our pedagogy to teach the operations of thinking, feeling, and willing so that they may be made conscious. For if we do not know the difference between an emotion and a thought, we will know very little. We need to understand the components (of emotions) at work... in order to free their hold.
• Inhabit ourselves that we may indeed do what we want to do.
• Our works and our play. All our pleasures experienced as the pleasure of love. What could be better that? To feel in one's work the tender and flushed substance of one's dearest concern.