I will if you will

I have a hat hanging in my shop that says that, I will if you will. I thought it would be something I sold but I got embarrassed by the wide open possibility of it and stopped making it, but I like the broader thoughts there so maybe I will bring it back. It would seem new and I guess I need some new hat designs, to please my customers, the ones who read each and every hat looking for the perfect one. I wonder how many of them noticed my absence yesterday.

Yes, I skipped Saturday Market yesterday. It was a hard decision but the right one for my body, so I tried to convince myself that if I had a cold, that would be more clear, and easier. My issue was that I had overworked and a chronic condition had flared up...I have a nerve issue in my left arm. I knew the lifting would make it worse. Lifting all of my wares and fixtures four times adds up to a lot of work, all harder with an injury. The right thing to do, to rest, was clear, but it wasn't the easy thing to do.

As are many life decisions, this one was complicated by many conflicting desires. I would have had pretty good sales. I heard someone had their best week ever. That part was pretty hard, and self-destructive in a sense, since I need the regular presence and the sales to keep everything on track. Yet the physical issues trumped that; if I lose the use of the arm for all practical purposes, I'll have to quit all the way. So skipping a week was a compromise and it did work. The arm is better. I should be able to manage the week's work work that is really important to me and to the OCF. People are counting on me that don't even know me or anything about me.

I tuned out the world, washed my dishes and mopped the floors and tried to baby my arm. I pondered my future and the future of hand-crafting. There had been some heated discussions on the OCF Facebook sites about the future of crafts at OCF that highlighted some of the essential differences in perspective. I chatted with everyone who helped me with my printing this week to see how off-base my thinking might be compared to the larger general public and volunteer population of OCF. I had just been explaining at a party last week how the Fair seems to be shifting its focus from a craft fair to a festival. I claimed there was a culture of folks who went from festival to festival, dressing in fairy and other costumes and partying, looking for peak transformational experiences and fun, but not really caring if the stuff they had or bought was handmade or not. I also claimed that there was a stupendous amount of stuff being sold around Fair, in the campgrounds, along the roadsides, and from person to person that had nothing to do with the  hand-crafted goods that we crafters sell in our booths.

My little bit of personal research showed I was more-or-less correct, but it also shifted my thinking by reminding me that situations like this grow organically by individuals making practical and unrelated decisions about things that don't amount to social movements, and in no way are they calculated to undermine or change anything that is already in place. Change just happens. All the people who sell things just do so because the opportunity presents itself, and they take what seems to be the easiest and quickest route to their solutions to taking advantage of the opportunities. For instance, let's imagine that some group of people were at a festival or the Fair, and they thought of a description for themselves, their group. It makes a good t-shirt, as it has that appeal of being something that begs more information, gives a sense of belonging, and creates group cohesiveness for a small group of friends. Then, and I'm speculating in a general sense, to cover their Fair costs, a person makes and sells the shirts or has them made, creates a website for them perhaps, commissions more designs when they catch on, and then curiosity spreads. As the group gets bigger, the individual cooler full of drinks and snacks for family and friends evolves to a potluck, then maybe to an organized distribution network of bigger quantities, say perhaps a keg, which then requires some kind of controlled system to keep it from being used by opportunists or kids below the drinking age, and then some mugs are perhaps commissioned and rented out or sold. Something like that could develop. It wouldn't be intended to be a problem for anyone, and it doesn't break any rules, in fact, it allows better compliance with rules such as preventing underage drinking. So let's imagine that about a thousand of these kinds of things developed in relation to OCF over the last four decades. Some fizzled and some stuck, some were great legends and some are still there to be found.

At no point did anyone think about how this might affect a person who prints shirts, or makes mugs, and sells those items in a craft booth. There was no intention to shift the Fair emphasis from celebrating handmade art
 objects to selling commercially made objects outside of the "eight". Those two things were not seen to be related, and aren't seen that way, and the proliferation of folks who want to be festers and want to flit around in wings and little dresses without pockets having fun and not buying crafts or things to carry was not anyone's intention. So no foul. When I look at that and relate it to my decreasing ability to screenprint shirts by hand and to get my goods to the marketplace, I'm making an attempt to relate two things which aren't really in the same realm at all. There should be room for their party and my booth, and my aging process and ability to make a living for myself should not really be thrown into the discussion of what someone in a campground does with their spare time and money.

The Facebook groups have really changed how the Fair Family communicates and thinks about each other. We used to just have our private discussions and meetings, then our FFN with the opportunity to write articles or letters, and the Board meetings for issues that didn't get heard or resolved at the lower levels. People with what we could call "Pressing Member Issues" generally kept them to their group of friends unless they had a crisis and then they sometimes exploded with a letter or angry rant and generally didn't get a helpful response. They often targeted a random volunteer with their rant, often not anyone in a position to provide any help at all, due to a general lack of information about who does what, which is just another area where Fair grew organically without a great deal of intention or supervision. Because we do not have a person in charge of everything, and we never will. We have people in charge of things, some paid to be, but there is way too much going on to have it all under centralized control. That's just the way it is in large groups of people intent on having fun and putting on an event.

Our little group of a thousand crafters and their representatives on the Craft Committee do not always see the issues outside of our perspective. We don't always know what is going on in the campgrounds, at pre-Fair, or along the surrounding roads. We have our heads down and are doing our work as fast as we can during the months and days before and during Fair itself. We see our own culture, and our needs and issues, and we see our diminishing abilities to survive in our world without safety nets, and we can build up fears that don't resonate for others. Like my absence at Saturday Market yesterday, our one craft and booth is not really something so essential that we will make a tear in the fabric if we step back. It's a big tear to us, but the fabric quickly reweaves if we quit or take a Fair off or even die. Obviously many essential Fair family have indeed died and the fabric has rewoven around the hole they left. It has been important to the few who were directly connected but less important to the many who were not.

And that is life. It's important for me to remember that I am small and my concerns are not generally shared. My crisis is not someone else's immediacy. What some of us crafters see as an erosion of all we have created and depend upon, was not intended to be, and we have the job of showing the relationship of it, if indeed there is one. Someone selling a cool commercially made t-shirt in a campground does not mean I can't sell my cool t-shirt in my booth, and with as many thousands of people as we have at Fair, it probably means nothing to my sales. I just have to hold my own with my handmade things in the ocean of things that are not handmade. So I have to feature myself in my presentation: have my hangtag that says how I use a craft technique to make this product one at a time and how this product will improve your life and keep me alive too. I have to make that matter to you, to keep that direct link connected, or I won't make it in the Fair as we know it today. Maybe OCF should help me with this, maybe they do, maybe I'm on my own.

Nothing was calculated to make it harder for me. Nobody overworked my arm (but me) and no one decided not to care about my future when they bought commercially made OCF items to sell or made a product to sell to their friends or fill a need for their family or community group. So me ranting about my fears is not going to get a great response, just as it has always been when any small interest group or person with an issue tries to get the greater attention of the big spinning peach. There lies some of the frustrating response to the struggle to define and protect the hand-crafted part of OCF. Lots and lots of people don't see a problem. Lots and lots of people never thought about it, can't relate, and have no idea what we crafters are talking about.

The reality at OCF now is that many goods being sold, both outside the craft booths and within, are not handcrafted by the definition we've assumed was common knowledge: one person making a thing and selling it to another person. Lots of people have responded to the Fair opportunity by making other choices: that of taking on a partner to do some of the work, buying commercial components to lessen the workload, or simply buying commercially made items to elevate the income and fun for the individual during the brief window of monetary exchange that happens there. Maybe they're opportunists or maybe they have a bad arm and can't approach the marketplace like they used to, but they still need to pay the rent. Maybe they lie or maybe they interpret the words in the guidelines differently, or maybe they don't even know what the guidelines say. Maybe they juried in or were grandfathered and don't even know they are not in compliance with the guidelines. Maybe they used to comply, and now they don't really care and don't see the point.

It's the time in our history to pause on this ridgeline and look at the downslope of history on one side and the future on the other. What can we do with what we see and know and how can we resolve all of our differing views and parts and keep a cohesive community going for the next decade or more? Do we let the handcrafter flounder in the sea of commercially made goods or do we give them some protection? Do we find a way to keep the people who aren't in compliance or do we find a way to jettison them? Can we weather all the narrow interests which will spawn the rants and letters and now Facebook posts of people who don't have the broad knowledge to see the big picture, and see it clearly? These are huge questions with very little agreement in the larger groups that form and revolve and break apart and reform continually within our very large membership.

They aren't simple questions, and discussing them brings up fears and defensive responses and even personal attacks. I am not prepared, as a Craft Committee Member and longterm craftsperson, to be castigated for my questions or my answers. I wish I were confident that I could speak out and discuss these issues without bringing harm upon myself or people I work with and know. I have my struggles. I can't stay on Facebook for hours each day patiently explaining that screenprinting is a craft technique and I am allowed to do it on commercially made goods because I am a printer and not a seamstress. It doesn't matter that I have done it for forty years and am wearing myself out. It doesn't matter that I skipped Market to serve the Fair, had to make that agonizing choice yesterday. The fifty or sixty dollars that I didn't pay Market won't break the budget, and the people from out of town who didn't get to buy my crafts found something else to buy. If I died and my craft booth was given to someone else, that wouldn't matter either. What would matter?

I think all that would matter is that we all did the best we could at every step, with every question and every answer, to think of each other and the good of the commons. It would matter whether or not we listened with an open mind to another's experience and opinion. It would matter that we were giving and kind, not selfish and grasping. It would be important that we thought of our own well-being and survival and set some priorities so that we would not hurt ourselves or sacrifice too much or let each other down. It would be best if we worked hard to find the elegant solutions instead of pushing for decrees that didn't really solve the problems and indeed created greater problems. We can't just have a majority vote on things in our culture. We are committed to the consensus process. We have to take the time to care for each other. We really can't let that go. See if you can do your part. It is going to take all of us to really do a good job. I will if you will.