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.