An interesting aspect of Thomson’s work is his fascination with the idea of multiple firings. Some of the fish ponds have been through 14 or 15 ‘trials by fire’. If the Earth were a pot, one wonders, how many firings would it take to make it habitable to life and to life’s transformations? Do we believe the physicists who say there was only one Big Bang? In some very important respects, the creation of these bowls is the creation of earth stories that the physicists have created. And, if we are really interested in what the Physics of Chaos can tell us about the origin of the cosmos, what better way to contemplate the associated mysteries than by meditating on what we can discover, if not in Jim Thomson’s own backyard, then certainly in the ceramic artifacts of his back-garden exploration of natural reality...Janis Runge