Hey! I'd love to hear your thoughts, send me a voice note.

Asma Waheed tried to go to art school three times.

The first time, at fourteen, her father talked her out of it. He told her that if he sent her to art school, he would lose her, so she studied home economics instead and carried on like that for years. The second time, at West Virginia University, she was one semester in when she became pregnant with her first child and had to withdraw. The third time, a master's at Hood College, she made it three weeks before learning she was pregnant with her fourth. Five years went by.

This is a conversation about what she did with the waiting.

Asma is a multidisciplinary artist from Ellicott City, Maryland, working in clay, metal, fiber, wood and mirrors, with an MFA from the Mount Royal School of Art at MICA. She came to the United States from a small town outside Faisalabad, too nervous at first to answer the telephone in English. She learned the language in a year, raised four children, and found her way back to the studio one class at a time.

She came to clay in 2011, the year her mother died, through a workshop called Healing Through Clay. The first time she touched it, she describes a state of khushu: her brain quiet, nothing else in the room. She has worked with it ever since, and she calls it her fifth child.

Much of this episode is her reading her own faith through the material. Centering a ball of clay on the wheel, which took her a year to learn, as the foundation underneath everything built on top of it. Firing as the trial that either breaks you or makes you stronger. Compression as the squeeze that strengthens. Unfired clay, which can be rehydrated and reclaimed, against fired clay, which is changed forever. And clay as a record: it remembers how it was handled, down to the fingerprints of whoever shaped it.

She closes on the dua (prayer) she has made for years: Ya Allah, don't let me waste me.

Follow her work on Instagram: @asmawaheedart and website: https://asmawaheed.com/

Man laysa lahu wird, laysa lahu wārid.