the.com/potter
the one who turns mud and spin into something you'd eat dinner off.
means To potter is to busy yourself with small, pleasant, unhurried tasks without any urgent purpose; as a noun, a potter is someone who shapes clay into pots and vessels.
from Two strands meet under one word. The craftsman's 'potter' comes from 'pot' — an old Germanic word for a vessel — plus the '-er' that names a doer, so quite literally 'a maker of pots.' The dawdling 'potter,' meaning to fuss about idly, is a separate thread: it grew from the older verb 'pote,' meaning to poke or prod, so to potter is to keep poking gently at little things. Americans turned the same poking into 'putter.'
ancient craftPottery predates farming and writing by millennia
the wheelSpinning clay can reach 100-plus rotations per minute
radiocarbon clueBroken shards date entire archaeological sites
kiln heatStoneware fires above 1200 degrees Celsius
japanese idealWabi-sabi prizes the cracked and imperfect pot