Riding home, I got soaked, and grinned.

 Despite getting soaked on the way home (that 5:00 rain prediction was accurate...) I had a super day yesterday. We enjoyed a late summer fairly regular market day with very low member attendance. There were a lot of competing events, from Bush Barn, Boise and Shrewsbury fairs to the Springfield Block Party, so many people were off making money elsewhere, but lots of us dependable members were doing our traditional part to get through the "shoulder season" to the time when the students come back.

I really miss the tracking and analysis that used to be a regular part of our management. We knew what was happening and what was likely to happen. No one was playing innocent about what was going on, no one was blocked from getting the information they wanted and needed. In the archives I read a report from Beth saying (paraphrasing here) something about paring 4% off site costs and 3.5% off office costs. This attitude of constantly refining how the org was being managed so the members would be paying the most fair fees possible and nothing would be wasted was the rule of our past managers. We had the weekly census, lots of reports with graphs and trends in our financial analysis every month and certainly at the Annual Meeting. It is the members' right to know as much as possible about how their money is being spent. I remember when crossing the $1000 threshold in the highest HM fees was avoided for years as we knew it would be a hard crossing for all of us. And this year the fees are astronomical, with no data or analysis done to justify that. I know some on the Budget Committee tried to give us data. 

Beth came to it naturally though she was mentored by Bill for the first part of her employment to make sure everything was brought forward from our institutional knowledge, and whatever skills she needed to work on were identified and strengthened. Any good manager welcomes the opportunity to get feedback and training to do their job better...but we have experienced an arrogance in our recent past that there is nothing to be learned from longterm members, past managers, or anyone. It would be shocking to any Board that their suggestions for improvement were met with defensiveness and threats and stonewalling but we are not under that type of Board now. We can hope for the future. 

I had a lot of conversations yesterday about what has happened to our "middle class" as was posted in the newsletter as a question that has no answer. All of the people I talked with knew the answer. It is obvious what is going on with our membership and anyone observing the selling day and season can clearly identify it. We have a large number of sensible, tough business managers within our membership. You have to learn how to be that if you are going to be successful in a microbusiness such as ours in an economy such as this. 

It takes a large range of skills and we are all there to help each other thrive. That is why we come on marginal weather days...to make a market. We come for each other, we bring extra plastic, we do our little things to help when help is needed (and often when it is not, as we are an independent lot used to depending on ourselves.) Most of us are pretty careful about our advice-giving tendencies as most of us don't really enjoy getting advice. We like learning from experience. There are so many commonalities about the conversations I have with members and farmers throughout the day. 

I discovered the guy selling caponata (go try it...Il Capo Foods at the farmers') had ties to two of our food booths from his childhood and we shared a very fun story. I had made some special edition t-shirts for Nice Rice and Fresh Squeeze, a complex 6-color print that remains one of the most complex designs I did during that period. When I drew the lettering I did it one letter at a time as some repeated, like the four EEEEs and then put the words together, and in one of my favorite Freudian mistakes I left the U our of Squeeze. I printed and signed the 50 premium shirts and no one noticed anything until this young person, who was just learning to read, asked his parents what Sqeeze meant. He was the kid. We both had vivid memories of it. Here's a photo of the revised edition:

I redid the art and screens and made 50 more for free, chagrined for many years at how working without enough care was something that could so easily happen, and I didn't do anything like that until a shirt I made years later that was supposed to read JUSTICE at the top read JUST ICE due to a bit of badly done spacing. Again I redid it for free with a bit less waste, but that is what you do when you own a mistake and try again at doing your best a little bit better. It is humbling but after a lifetime of making art on commission I know I have not always done as well as someone who actually studied art and wasn't self-taught by doing it over time. I've always had that knowledge that I am not perfect and it has not been one of my goals to pretend to be perfect. I don't even believe in the concept.

It is instead a way of appreciating life to say something was perfect. It is gratitude. It is often how we feel at the end of a market day, or even the beginning when all of our hopes and expectations are high and the air is fresh and expectant too. I love both ends of market when we work alongside each other putting it up and taking it down. I am often filled with a sense of some kind of perfection, something close but human.

Yesterday I tried hard to channel something I learned about Raven, who sold in my space for a couple of decades before he retired. He made shakers and was a kind of shaman to people who knew him, and a kind of spiritual companion to me as he patiently helped me download and analyze my experiences and make sense of my life every week. I've been lucky to have quite a few of those companions at market and at my other jobs and life places, always reminding me that I am not doing anything alone even though I try to pretend I am the only one responsible for what is happening in my life. 

He would set an intention in the morning for the whole market (you can hear it in the little song he and his wife wrote and performed): Prosperity and Fun for Everyone. Magic. He would shake those shakers all day long, keeping that rhythm going for the universe to hear, along with the fountain and drum circle and strains of music from the stage and buskers and conversations randomly overheard and everything that swirled around us for all of us to absorb. I failed to fully appreciate the magnitude of this gift of his presence, probably. I may have written about it in the earlier blog posts, may have captured our joy and appreciation to some degree. Probably did, as well as embodied it, because on some days like yesterday, I feel loved and have beams of it coming from my space to everyone around me, spilling off me as I walk around and spread my money to others. I bought a lot of things yesterday and enjoyed spending every dollar. 

It's not that rare to have those moments in the center of town. It's so fun to mark them with other people who notice them too. There are thousands of little moments and little expressions of love we share with each other every week. No two weeks are the same.

It is so painful to see this dimmed for those of us targeted for hardship by the narcissist. It has become so hard. People are missing who should be sharing in it. It is not the way we built it to be, and we need it back.

Someone told me they thought humanity had six months before we are destroyed by forces we cannot control, My thought was, inside the grief that I could almost believe it, what will I do with my wild and precious six months?

It is an impossibility to imagine or manage that thought, which if I were truly conscious would have always been my orientation to life...I could have six minutes, six days, possibly six years. I'm pretty fit still, so more than six seconds. But I do not know that, and none of us do. What we get is the chance to be present now, the next now, and the one after that, if we can. Then maybe a different kind of present.

And in the meantime, let's sell our little doo dads and our fine art and our self expression with as much meaningful content, spiritual embodiment, generosity and care as we can extend. Let's be together and let's get these forces of selfish greed and malevolence out of our community. They just can't have our joy. I'm gonna keep shaking that shaker on that corner as long as I can. I want you there with me. 

We are aiming for the heart.