Rain? But I'm not ready!

It's never all that easy. It's probably Disney or some other cultural mythos that makes us think life can be so rainbowey and full of love...there are the occasional moments of joy and satisfaction. Mostly it feels like we have to talk ourselves into feeling okay with things. I like the Four Agreements because they tend to stick in my mind where things like the Fifteen Cognitive Errors of Negative Thinking are too hard to call up when needed. We refine them over time to fit our own needs, but the Four Agreements are kind of simple: Be Impeccable, Don't Take it Personally, Don't Make Assumptions, Do Your Best. Maybe too simple.

I keep that stuff on my refrigerator, as I am a visual learner who has to see things frequently to keep them foremost. Some of the fifteen errors come up so often they are identifiable as personality tendencies, as in, I do tend to Personalization (it's all about me), indulge in the many fantasies of Control (blogging being one I suppose), and believe the Fallacies of fairness, justice, you know what I mean. We all have many areas of our lives where we are just indulging in wishful thinking.

Like ignoring the weather reports. Yesterday it did indeed rain and if I had bothered to heed the warnings I would definitely have taken the booth instead of the two shade umbrellas with their many drip edges and other inadequacies for a day in the park. I did not feel like the experienced craft professional who is my best side. I didn't do my best, and I made assumptions. It wasn't as bad as Tuesday when I knocked my entire display into the aisle during set-up...narrowly missing a fellow worker and coming dangerously close to wiping out our Market's founder. I can just see the headlines: Market Founder Killed by Booth of Usually Kindly Elder. "I thought I knew what I was doing," the experienced craftsperson explained, "but I tried something new...."

New things happened. I have been experimenting with fitting into my fountain space at the Tuesday Farmers' Market: it's a narrow one so I have a long display with my bags and the hats on top, and shade for me and my customers and the dyed bags which will fade. I knocked it over trying to put up the second umbrella without really watching what might happen next. It was stupid, like pretending it never rains in the summer. I have my excuses, but they don't amount to a hill of beans when someone almost gets hurt.

I've also been having a problem of people stepping into the fountain while looking at my hats, so this week I tried hard to solve that once and for all by a different set-up, and indeed I think I succeeded in that, but was so focused on solving the one problem I didn't cover the others. Weather isn't so serious, though. I had some wet things, which will dry today, and weren't ruined. It rained on me again while I was leisurely unloading and unpacking at home, but it felt kind of nice at the end of the day.

Emotionally it has been rough around the Market, and the resentments and disappointments are still simmering. It grates on me that I am not seen as I am, a human trying from within my limits to improve and one struggling in the very same ways as everyone else on the blocks. People resent me selling the hats, which were grandfathered in some years back with two other hat-decorators, after the Standards Committee and Board passed a rule banning decorated commercial hats. Beth had to come to me at Holiday Market and tell me I could no longer sell my best-selling product, which had been overlooked, as at the time I was not selling on Saturdays due to being a single mom remodelling my house while working for 4J. Couldn't do Saturdays, but just HM, for about a decade. It was a shock, and she wisely allowed me to finish out the HM with them and bring them to Standards after the season ended. That was a relief, but then I had many weeks to stew over it.

Of course I got defensive and hurt and spent countless hours preparing my arguments and getting all up into my fears and self-righteous ego flights. I have been a member since 1975...was there to sign the Articles of Incorporation, was there in the extreme budget crisis we had in the 80's, the personnel crises, all of the tough times we had as we attempted to step up and set a firm foundation for our organization, coming from our limited skills to make something that would last and keep us all alive. We weren't all that good at it, and lots of people got mad, hurt, and some went away, but we all learned together how to treat each other and live as a community, a family even. I have a huge sense of belonging from that continuous effort, but I certainly have never received any special favors for it. I had to bring my little products down and spread them on the round table and try to keep the tears in as I explained why I thought I should be able to sell them. None of my history was relevant. I was just a craftsperson doing a craft that looked different from the current Market realities.

In those days the discussions were held with the craftsperson present, so I understand the current system that allows the committee to deliberate confidentially on these issues. It was really hard to hear my family members make their pronouncements on my future. For the record, my justifications were that I was really selling my body of work, my sense of humor and writing abilities, my graphic arts abilities and my screenprinting expertise, all hard won over time with constant effort. They happened to be concentrated on a commercially made product, a carefully chosen high-quality one, which was quite difficult to print, and I had been selling them for about a decade at that point. No one was even trying to handmake a baseball hat, much less screenprint on one, so it wasn't direct competition, like a felted or straw hat with a fabric flower applied to it would be to a person who hand-blocked their hats. My arguments were good, the committee was kind to me, and they grandfathered the three (the other two were tie-dyers) of us in, in what I thought was a good decision, regardless of the benefit to me.  Not everyone on the committee was happy with the decision though, and some have never acted warm to me since. I can't say I have let it go completely either, but I have tried hard to separate their committee service and opinions from them as people, tried to still buy from them or chat with them, or at minimum accept our different opinions as just that. It would have been highly inappropriate to tell a member their product was all of a sudden not acceptable, but I had been making them since before the days of screening each new product and the Market was changing, trying to be more professional and supportive of real handcrafting. I could see that it wouldn't be good for Market to have a lot of commercial hats with minimal decoration, and I still feel I have to upgrade my product and raise my artistic contribution to keep it really compliant. I'm convinced it is, but like the printed t-shirt, someday it might be judged unacceptable and I will have to live with that.

Change brings personal challenge, and I may end up on the other side of that in the current OCF struggles, may end up as part of a body telling juried-in crafters they are now juried-out. That's still a long way down the road, but I'm just making the point that we don't know how things will change. We are, a lot of the time, in reaction mode to the unexpected wrinkles of our lives. We all get caught up in the folds and start to thrash around, but we ought to attempt to have a few thoughts for those we thrash upon.

We all operate with these old hurts driving our thoughts and present actions. I noticed in a discussion of alcoholism and addictions with my son that tons of old stuff came up for me, the many people I have seen die slowly from the self-hatred of addictive behaviors, the ways the addictions still operate in me despite my knowledge and work to dispel them, the ways our lives are formed almost without our awareness. I once told him that every lame thing in our lives came from alcohol or drugs...a too-simple view of things that shaped us, but I wanted to get the point across that if he was hurting from something, the pull to addiction in its many seductive forms was going to cause unexpected injuries on top of the original hurt. It's hard to free ourselves from the many levels of this, and many blog posts could be written. I'll just make the point again that when we thrash around, we don't really see all the damage we cause.

So while you may be in distress and feel up in your own cognitive errors and you are stuck at #9 Blaming, and are blaming me, or any other person, for that matter, quit it. It hurts. I have given and am still giving and have a lifetime of giving, and if I have a few gains from that, I have earned them. I don't sit in judgement. I'm in the group that is working on the details, doing the paperwork, hauling the heavy stuff down and opening it up. I'm the witness at the meetings, I'm there to record it as accurately as I can. Yes, I get paid to do that. Members of SM can know that I get paid $10 an hour to record the meetings, take notes, and type up the notes for the public record. I do it as a volunteer for OCF and have done it as a volunteer for Market too. Now we have the means and desire to pay a little for it, to see it as a job for staff and an important enough job to have a consistent, more-or-less professional finish to it, and I would point out that there are not many people who would want the job. It's really quite hard sometimes to listen to the recordings and try to put a coherent layer of organized thought over what is sometimes just emotional discharging and at other times important life-changing progress.

I hope everyone takes a step back this week and thinks a little more about the downstream effects of their anger and the pain they express. Like my cascade of booth parts and the rain that sneaked down into my bags, sometimes disaster is narrowly averted and things fall over that you hadn't meant to tip or drip. Simple physics can apply: every action causing an equal and opposite reaction, matter not being created or destroyed, but transformed, and so on, everything you do and say has an effect you might not have anticipated. You are responsible for this, though you may sidestep and not even notice the aftershocks. Somehow you have to find the time and gain the skills to walk through this life with kindness and much more compassion than you think you can find within. You have to dig deep. That is what makes life a little bit more tolerable, a little less filled with terrifying change, a little less painful.

Nobody gets it that easy. We really have to work to lift each other up. We really can make powerful change, and to our luck, that sometimes happens as an after-effect too. We could make it a little easier on each other. Let's keep that in our minds as we enter the harder seasons of autumn and winter. You don't know what is being carried by others, but don't make the mistake of thinking that their hands are empty. At minimum, they have a piece of the truth.

Which is why we have learned to work as a group, with the process of attempting to find consensus, if not perfect agreement. We find something we can live with. If you don't feel that you are an equal part of the group, doing the same job as all of the rest of us, start there. If all you see is a Them in front of you, walk around and look from a different angle. See yourself as Us.

Then what will you do to help us? It might involve some hard work, some time, some selflessness, some learning, some stretching. You might have to shed some denial and some pride or whatever keeps you feeling superior or isolated. It might take your whole life to learn how to do this, to belong.

I'm still working on it, obviously. I appreciate your efforts as well. Hope everyone gets some time off from their many labors this weekend. And now I will go and hang some hats on the line.

All of us in the basket

Some of the favorites-grew the garlic from some I had bought 

I'm on of the ones who gets triggered by suicides, my little niche of PTSD that comes up now and then to remind me that mental illness is a spectrum on which we all reside. Everyone's perceptions are flawed for their own protection; our coping mechanisms of believing ours is the one true reality are sometimes just as non-functional as others: organized religion, obsessive control fantasies, and so on. I won't say a lot about it, but just recognize that lots of people walk around in fragile states every day, and it doesn't show, or you don't recognize it.

I know that when I get in that fragile state I need reassurance. I've learned that I have to work on those occluded, hidden memories that still give me messages from my earliest childhood, so I know what to tell myself, know how to identify my state, and after all these years of working on it I do feel like I have some control. But man, I can see it when people don't feel that control, can't find it. It is terrifying, especially for them, even if they are in that numbed frozen state between fight and flight. It's as real as the tomatoes in the garden, and at the same time, it is unreal, because it isn't tangible, can't be touched or seen clearly. There are tragedies every day, and insurmountable pain, and all the lesser degrees of that too. It's profoundly affecting, so we humans spend a lot of time looking away, glad that isn't us. We grab our straws of functionality and keep on working.

We feel fairly helpless around it, and embarrassed and blocked by that. We don't think there is anything we can do to help. Sometimes we are helping without knowing, though, reassuring without contact. Sometimes you can feel the need pulling you, and you can resist, not being willing to touch it. Sometimes you can just be soft with it, allow it without engaging. Once in awhile you can actually do something to fix a small part of it. You can touch the person, you can offer the reassurance. Often that is what I feel we do every Saturday on the Park Blocks. Our constant, joyful presence provides the reassurance that beauty can be created, new ideas do come, and some things remain the same. We are grounded in our traditions and we are open to all the change that we can fit within our blocks.

Many many people come to feel that joy and constancy. We call them regulars or customers or tourists or friends and neighbors, but as the community gathering place we welcome them and are changed by them, as we change their day and try to add something to their lives. It's humbling and I find a few tears nearly every week as someone lets me see inside. It is no easy task to bring all that openness and compassion downtown every week. Some of us do it twice. My Tuesday Market buddy brought all of herself down this week and didn't make a sale, and she needed the money. I wasn't able to give her a pity sale, because I was in heavy self-protection mode, waiting to see if my reaction would occur, if it would be heavy, how long it would last. I was in hypervigilance, and she was too. I was grateful for her presence and her awareness, and I hope we made each other feel safe. We talked quite a bit about depression and death, and choices, and of course that isn't so conducive to sales, so maybe she can add that to the reasons she didn't sell well. Subtle currents run deep, and apparently no one saw that she needed them to buy her work, or they had pools of their own to keep treading water in. Surely Saturday will work better for her.

Steel Web earrings, moss agate

I was going to write about honesty and honor. I lied a lot as a kid, which I read yesterday is a typical part of childhood trauma, a tactic to lessen fear and confusion. A couple of adults in my life tried to help, gently or brutally, in the 50's way of thinking, which wasn't too evolved. I can look back now and see how hard it was for them to know what to do. They were sure I would need honesty in my later life, so felt compelled to install it, with whatever tactics they knew. While washing my mouth out with soap definitely got my attention, I so wish I had the kind of adult who would have hugged me and reassured me that I would always have enough, that my fears would lessen, and who could bring me back to feeling safe. I am always brought to tears when I see parents who know how to do this, and my hope for the future is high when I view that type of evolution.

I was of course a flawed parent, but when my son was in his deepest existential struggle, I said we would only have one rule: we both had to be honest. It was hard! I had to address my drinking, my relationships, my personality, my own existential struggles, and I had to really step up for him. I hope he learned to trust me more. I hope it gave him the ground to stand on that I wanted to provide. He does seem to be a secure and honest person, but then there is all that genetic stuff that he will have to discover for himself...I'm still terrified on that level. I always want to go to him for reassurance in my triggered state, though I have learned not to.

It's funny to me, but I wanted to go to Beth as well. She is like the Statue of Liberty to me, she provides the ultimate reassurance to me that people are good, ethical, honest, forthcoming and loving. At the Board meeting, at the end, she said something I have heard her say before, that is profoundly touching. She said something to the effect of: "Let's keep everyone in the basket."

We have to keep everyone in the basket. It's not just a symbol of the variety of our crafts, it's the metaphor for our lives. We're all crammed in there with our leaves intertwined and our flowers shedding pollen on each other, waiting for the bees. We can't throw anyone out, we are all us. We need each other. I can't have a Saturday Market down there by myself, no matter how dedicated I am. I need all of you there.

I know I said that in my last post, that we are us. I don't think many people really feel that, in either SM or OCF, but that is what provides me with the greatest reassurance. We all feel left out sometimes. I can't go to things on Saturdays unless I am willing to give up a lot, so I miss out on the picnic and people's parties and weddings and writing conferences, and sometimes those sacrifices don't pay off. My sense of belonging, though, really hinges on my weekly participation in the community gathering. I love isolation, so I need that forced interaction. I've thrived within the basket for forty years, and I plan to stay in it.

It is one of the places I learned and practice honorable behavior, where I care about my reputation and all of my actions. I can't hide there. It's one of our core values: we run the Market on the honor system. I don't know if people are taught to be honorable, if modern young people think it is important to be honest and dependable and do what is right. I'm not sure how I learned it, but for me it is a weekly practice and I barely think about it. I always pay my true booth fee, no rationalizations. I don't feel that all the money I make is even mine. I owe Market far more than ten percent of my sales.

So it is easy for me, because Market made me who I am and I am so very grateful for it every day. I've been honest with Market for 40 years and Market is honest with me. The fine and generous people who volunteer respect me, and all of us, enough to be gentle and firm and loving, and ask only for a fair share, to keep going. All of the Market income comes from our members. We pay all of our bills with it. We don't get grants, or even many donations, we work for our pay and we invest in ourselves for our longterm health and for our very existence.

Earrings by Gila Fox

It hasn't been so many years since the City hated us, the farmers hated us, the activists hated us, and the public didn't trust us much either. Over the decades we have had to earn the trust and respect we enjoy now, but it isn't something we can stop working on. We have endured because we come down there every week and put it all out there to be seen. We are honest about it. We are as authentic as it gets.

That keeps us strong and alive and allows us to be there for our community. We are so much more than a celebration or a marketplace. We are so important, in our small corner of the very big universe. We are essential, and we need your honest participation to continue to thrive.

So don't rationalize and pack early and cheat on your booth fees and hate on your neighbor. Those behaviors don't become you and you don't want to become them. Follow my one rule, to be honest, and meet me down there day after tomorrow. We're still growing and developing and working on our childhood pains, all of us, and we need each other to do it. Don't opt out, come in. We want you in the basket.

And don't worry about me, I am fine today, the little storm has passed and my strategies worked one more time. I feel safe. If you don't, I hope you know I care. A lot of people do. Try to stick around and feel it.

Do it, thoughtfully.

I can't seem to just get to work today. I worked yesterday, on my day off, and now I need a day off. I do not like to be this busy and it seems opposed to the weather and the lovely summer which is passing quickly as I watch. I did take a photo of my load last week, as it looked really cute to me. So organized and balanced, so neatly piled. I know it must look strange to see me pedal by, but I'm proud of how well I have this part of it dialed in.

There's a lot to do! My few customers all seem energized to order things, big and little, and I am pushing ahead on my bag ventures. I've now dyed some of the new locally made bags and they look pretty great, so today I am printing some of them for sale tomorrow at the Tuesday Market. My plan is to sell off the cheaper imported bags and go to all locally made, though it will take quite awhile to get there.

This is now the time for home improvement projects, too, and I decided to switch out the table in my project room, which led me to remember that it needs painting and this would be a great time to get those baseboards put on at last. I went and bought the wood and paint, and now have chaotic piles of tubs and boxes in the living room again, just like pre-Fair. Not conducive to relaxation.

My brother announced he is getting married in April (post-Jell-O Show, thank goodness) in Sydney, and I am challenging myself to go. I really don't want to fly around the world and go to exotic places. I've never been all that adventurous to begin with, but I do want to be there and it would be a big life experience, and a chance to go on an adventure with my son and his wife, as well as my Mom, who wants to go too. I'm trying hard to talk myself into it. It's a bit daunting, though I know it really isn't all that far from my comfort zone. They do speak English there. You don't even need any shots to go. I'll be turning 65 right about then, too, so all the more reason to do something big.

It's okay to feel overwhelmed. I just tell myself I don't have to go today, don't even have to decide today, though I have to get started on getting a passport. Thank goodness for the internet, because all stupid questions can find their answers online. It can just be one step at a time.

Market is going really well. I had my biggest sales day of the season this week, and wasn't even expecting it. There were a lot of tourists, and I don't think they had anything to do with track. It's probably predictable that during sports events I don't sell anything with Oregon printed on it...they get plenty of that over by campus. People do kind of like things with Eugene on them, though. The bags are selling fairly well, but this week it was almost all hats. People were in the sun and needed a hat, or were wanting gifts to take home, but gifts under $20. People liked my sense of humor, which is a big part of what I sell.

I'm so happy to have such a great product. I feel a bit conflicted, as I am using a commercial item and decorating it, using a craft technique that takes a lot of skill, but my items are not handmade like some people's. I'm not sewing the hats, and while I do dye and sew on some of the bags, I'm not handmaking the bags either, like some do. I'm well aware of the grey areas of crafting, after a lifetime of doing it in many forms. (I started at Saturday Market in 1975.) I'm not on the Standards Committee, but I take minutes for them, so I am involved in all of the intricacies of the decisions they feel called upon to consider. It is the hardest committee! I'm not on the Board either, but again, I take minutes, so I am involved in the consensus-seeking, decision-making process. I speak up if I have something to add.

Some of the decisions are really tough ones. The recent push to advance the artistry of jewelers by restricting the use of commercial charms and representative beads is a good example of a decision that has to be worked on periodically. Many jewelers find that the kind of low-priced items they can make with the charms are their bread and butter. Like my hats and bags, these items, priced around $15 or less, are what people want to buy a lot of the time. Of course we want to be known as a place where one can find the finest and most artistic of crafts, but we also need to be dependable for people on a budget, who will default to corporate crap if they can't afford anything at Market. I personally don't think we can make the restriction fly in its current form. There were at least two jewelers in my neighborhood who would find a huge portion of their items disallowed. Letting them continue to sell them for a year does not help. They still need low-priced options if they are going to be able to make enough at Market to make that 12-hour day pay off.

I'm less sure about requiring people to print their own shirts. I believe in the concept that people should have to be using a craft technique or two to sell at our Market. The Maker is the Seller. It shouldn't be the practice to make a phone call and have your craft items arrive fully formed at your doorstep, even though you designed them, chose the colors, and have to haul them down and pack them up. I feel at the same time that if you are standing there next to your work, as the artist, you are presenting the type of art we want to present.  Those two stances are contradictory in the matter of printed garments, so I don't know where I stand on that one. On the fence I guess. I suppose that not letting any more people join who don't print their own shirts is an okay solution, but I have helped a lot of artists get started by printing their shirts until they could find a way to print their own. Under the proposed rule they would not have had the chance to work their way up to where they are now, and a couple of them are really important members of our Market. So I'm undecided. I need more discussion and more time to consider it. I trust there are others who need more time, and I know from experience that our Market seldom moves very quickly. We take the time to consider. Part of the consensus-seeking process is that you almost don't need a vote, because you have talked it out. If you need a vote or the vote is close, you probably aren't yet at the elegant solution you are looking for.

If you as an artist go to the level where you are not really making the craft anymore, and having employees sell it as well, clearly you have left our definition of a handcrafter. Yet in today's economy, to support a family with your craft, you almost have to form a small business that you manage, using some number of employees to make your production work. Ideally you would still be using some craft techniques to do finish work or something on each item, but practically, you may just be the designer and visionary of the line, and not really the maker. Somewhere in there is a line you must be on one side of to qualify as a craftsperson.

We are challenged at OCF, where I am on the Craft Committee, to address this issue and find that line. It is going to be a difficult struggle I think. I think it is possible that we will have to go all the way to changing our bylaws to permit small businesses and designers to stay within the Fair. Clearly we have a number of them, maybe a large number. Saturday Market already decided that designers aren't qualified, unless they still hand-make every item they bring to sell. Technically this is the stance of OCF as well, but practically, the volume of sales there makes it probable that not all items sold at OCF are handmade by the maker. They might still be handmade, but they might be commercially made, too. It's difficult to tell. We have to decide how much this matters and just how to determine the limits of it. There will be meetings.

And meetings are full of people, usually a lot of people in a small, warm space, looking at each other around a roughly circular space. My main goal in the upcoming difficult discussions this month is to keep remembering and reminding each other that we are in a circle for a reason: it makes us equal. We are all us. We are working in a consensus-seeking manner. That means we all, respectfully, have to speak up with our pieces of the picture and all work together to make the best decisions we can.

There is no room in that small heated space for anger and hurt. There is no need to defend. You must challenge yourself to come with trust that you are welcome, you will be listened to, and there is no one in the room who wants to hurt you, personally or economically. If you feel that the rule, whatever it becomes, might hurt you, you will want to enter the process to make it a rule that won't hurt you, or others. But you have to do that without anger and fear.

Hurting others is never the goal. The goal is improvement for all. If a rule is clearly not going to bring improvement, it will not fly, so let's just work together toward our goals without the pain. Let's trust each other. That starts within you, so take some time before you attend, or before you write your letter, to clarify your fears and own them. Don't bring them with you unless you can take the fear part out and identify the real concerns.

Afraid of the future? Aren't we all at times? Feeling poor, and like you need every penny you can find? Lots of people are in the same boat. Feeling like someone is out to get you? I am here to tell you that is not correct. I have observed absolutely no one in the process with a personal axe to grind. That stuff is identified right away and doesn't survive group process.

Trust me, as I am a witness to the process when I take minutes. If you can't trust me, trust Beth, who as GM of SM, has the highest ethics and commitment to fairness possible to carry. She will not stand by an unfair decision without speaking up. I believe that an unfair decision will not happen in our inclusive process. So trust the process. Work to trust the people. At least work to treat them with compassion and respect. Work hard on it.

When good people gather to do good work, most fears are dissolved and not realized. Are you coming as a good person? I will too. We can work together. See you at the meetings!