You Can't Ruin Saturdays

 After a half century of studying the intersection of life at 8th and Oak, I can easily make this observation. I even remember a day when it rained 5 inches in 1981 (I think, as it was a very wet year that almost buried us) and there were 9 of us there underneath the overhang on the Butterfly wondering how we were going to pack our things up and get home. Apparently none of us watched the weather reports. And we must have been rather desperate for some income to unpack, if we even did. But we had each other and a bucket of laughs.

Booth fees back then were $3.50 and I remember a zero day when it was painful to pay that. Zero days still happen, but the payment is now $25 which generally becomes debt that can mount to make you ineligible to sell pretty quickly, even if you want to come back after that humbling day. Often you did nothing wrong to fail to sell anything. I don't know anyone who has never had a bad sales day and couldn't explain it. There is luck involved, weather of course, and some kinds of magic it is best not to examine too closely, but just allow to happen. Don't get in the way of the magic.

Early in my crafts career I recognized that money flows and the more you can trust that and relax, the more easily it can flow to you. I sometimes will go out and spend $20 just to get things going. The recipient might buy a cup of coffee or something else and that seller might buy another thing, or at least I have generated a small amount of goodwill to add to the cosmic quotient. This does not always require your cash, maybe just your attention, or the good mood your sales persona donned as you unloaded your booth that morning. I'm not saying it is easy, but I am nearly always smiling the whole day on the Park Blocks, as I am easily amused and people are so weird and mostly lovely.

We still have each other. That is our greatest strength, our ability to uplift the rest of our community in all of the ways we do it. Everything can be enjoyable, watching your neighbors make sales, hearing their little stories, or the times when the sun finally emerges from the fog and overcast of a day like yesterday. It got glorious and we gathered in the sunny spots and turned up our faces.

This will sound odd but yesterday I noticed the giant tree on the corner of the FSP as if for the first time. Yes, I am keeping an eye on my cognition as you would think I would have noticed it many times, and I have, but it is starting to turn colors and the sky was a lovely blue. There is one maple on the Oak Street perimeter of  the East Block that is usually the first to go red and will at some point carpet the sidewalks if we are lucky enough to see that before rains turn it all brown. It is going red.

When the City remodel plans came along, one of my special jobs was to advocate for some of the trees that were in line to be removed, including the giant magnolia on the West Block, near 8th, and others, some of which were indeed removed for "reasons," sometimes sadly because they were annoying for the boothholders and I expect the park maintenance crews. I am sure that before too long the excellent Honey Locust  that often blooms in slime green on the Slug Queen Coronation, and the American Elm on the East Block will have to go, if they are still there. I will have to check. It is harder to see what is gone unless you have treasured it while you did have it.

And there is my metaphor for this week. People in my cohort who have sold over the decades can see what is gone from our market, without getting distracted by the lovely improved farmers side. There was a particularly beautiful Elm on their site too, near the corner, too near the corner when the street went two-way. Turns out not everyone loves trees as much as they pretend to, because cars are dangerous. 

I'm not talking about physical infrastructure being lost, as little happened on the two southern blocks that was highly noticeable when the money was allocated to the northwest block to get something completed there. We got a few things, but kept the walls and most of the trees, and the fountain at least temporarily. We lost the coverings, which are still missed. But mostly, it wasn't physical changes for the last four years.

Now, if you could only see it, you would know that the members have lost our umbrella of rights and member participation that got us to here. Our committees have been stripped of independence and power unless they serve the diabolical aims of the narcissist, and we have a new category of offender, The Danger to the Market. This is any member that the narcissist can't dominate and control to her satisfaction, or use her more subtle techniques upon. Yes this is subjective, and the methods are there to be seen, but fly under the radar. That six month Code of Conduct revision is important in the erosion. So many things are deemed confidential and done in closed meetings that you will never find out the "evidence" or process, even if you ask and find one of the many people who don't actually know what confidentiality involves. Transparency is when you do things where other people can hear them, in open meetings, with the participants, who are told they will be discussed. We used to have even the most difficult conversations in open meetings, with the participants there to speak for themselves. That is gone.

First the false narratives are spread. I, of course, am old and ditzy and not to be believed, as I hate the market and this blog is just complaining and negativity. Many of us are old and ditzy. And yet in our other community roles, highly respected and not ditzy. Sure, quirky, but that quirk is the highly-sought-after-by-the-whole-region quality that brings people downtown on any given week. Ask anyone trying to promote anything in our town. 

A number of members have learned that something was said about them that caused them to lose their credibility, often a recounting of their words or behaviors that looked like some kind of mental illness...and then they are gently pushed out into retirement, or worked against until they are more violently removed. It hasn't always worked, but it has always been secretive. I was told I was an "egregious failure" for my decades of volunteering as an officer, in a post where there was a lot of manipulation of the truth after the manager was fired. You can't check on that, because history is buried by gatekeeping or revised by a barely true recounting by some "historian" who has been seduced into a web of false narratives. A public record exists, but you can't find it. 

One man has been accused of brandishing a gun that could have been used to shoot a crying baby! He denies it and no baby was actually involved...turns out we have a number of members who are licensed to carry. I mean, I don't really like the thought, but we are pretty vulnerable down there protected mainly by truth and magic. But he was accused and tried by the power of a lie and that is now in the public record without an opportunity to deny it. 

These false narratives are impossible to counter, are often put in writing, in the public record even, and with lies about character, if you protest, you look guilty. This is a common and transparent narcissist technique, rarely uncovered. Go read the transcript of that KLCC interview last December. You'll find out a lot of things that are patently untrue, or at minimum, reputation-destroying.

Our reputation in the community is solid about Saturdays being fun. Quirk increases in times of trouble, as people get confused and frightened. Why not be crazy, if they are already saying you are? Why not throw caution to the afternoon breeze? However, most of the targets are serious artisans who just want to make their living as they have been accustomed to do in the market we built together.

I am well aware that people do not want to believe or see these patterns destroying our organization and our community. Our membership is divided in two, for and against, though we are all pretty practiced at selling next to each other all day and avoiding the hard conversations and snarky remarks that come to mind. You wouldn't know from the outside how many people used to be friends and will never be again. You might not know who the targets are, who the enablers are, and who the main actors are. If you don't know much about narcissists, and have been turning off national politics out of your distress, you certainly don't want to believe that what is happening to us is similar. As in the national discourse, people don't feel safe talking about it. People shut down and tire of it all long before they get to the idea of helping to fix it. If you are not a target of a bully, you probably only see the charm they turn your way, and remember the time they pretended to be interested in you while gathering supply for their drama addiction. You have missed the thousand cuts some of us have felt deeply and continue to suffer. She did something nice for you and you failed to see it as favoritism, that was not available to the rest of us. You were just grateful that the rules were bent for you.     

But these false impressions do go out and are repeated and believed by the people who want to believe we have a charming manager who is doing her job, who don't think about whether or not lying and kicking out members and manipulating our community is in her job description. They don't notice if a few people leave or are forced out or stop being able to afford the sweeping fee increases. They won't notice if I am not at the first and last HM weekends this year...except the few who will decide I have finally died. Hey, I'm still healthy enough to last another few years anyway, though they might manage to throw out my craft, as it is also a Danger to Market apparently. 

Has anyone except media professionals noticed our promotions are crap? Yes, they have. An ad on the inside cover of Mom magazine is worth checking out, as a very sad photo of a lone musician turns out to be the narcissist's husband, who is apparently handy as the Fill-in-Guy, so when there is a gap in the entertainment schedule we get to further fund her family with our fees. Most of the posts of individual craft booths on social media fail to include the artisan's name, website link, or even their business name, which is a sad insult to the member who has worked so hard. I told them a few years ago not to promote me, so the guy with the camera doesn't even look at me for one of his dark photos. We are currently paying two people to do our promotions...you can judge for yourself if the rainbow is enuf.

It's a powerful rainbow, but it's cold and nasty under it, and it takes a lot of effort to prevail in any kind of unity and faith that we will survive this punishment era as a community of artists. We might get some of it back, if we get a new, dynamic staff that has imagination and skill and can craft a decent sentence and take an attractive photo. We need people who can carry the heart of empathy (not the performative kind of a drama addict) and keep in mind the values of equality, equity, fairness and justice that our organization was founded to put forth into the world. We can't survive the lies, the favoritism, nepotism, and greed that we are experiencing. We can't thrive in a fake reality that is shiny and like a Saturday looks from the outside. We live in the inside, where it used to be safe and warm.

 

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 Yana 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. 

No Rest for People Who Pay Attention

I wish I could get back the nights I have spent not sleeping because of worrying about the market. Over 51 years, they are countless. 

It is now two years since I have attended a Board meeting. I separated myself from it as I felt like the only person in the room doing any work, and I was not only providing a clear and comprehensive public record, but keeping up all of the checks and balances needed to guide a largely uninformed and unskilled group of people who were veering off into the unethical due to terrible leadership.

I had resisted being pushed out, stubbornly, since I knew my service was holding the market together, and as the Board progressed into blithely terminating two memberships of food booth owners because they correctly identified the lack of professional skills in the GM, their evidence based solely on her gaslighting and the collusion of a couple of her sycophants, I had to step away rather than be accountable for that. I was telling myself to get out of leadership for months, in great distress, as I was discovering how manipulated and controlled I was, along with all of the members. 

One of the hardest things in extracting oneself from a toxic and predatory situation is that you have already been complicit in many ways that you will be unpacking for months or years as you try to forgive yourself for not stopping it somehow. I still go through that. I had to say repeatedly "I'm not fixing it this time," as people kept looking to me to correct the ways we were straying from our normal into the psychopathic and authoritarian. It wasn't something one person could fix although somehow people still seem to be looking for a hero. 

It has devolved, of course. Some of the ways are ludicrous, some predictable, some so egregious that it is a wonder we still are operating. Obfuscation and outright lying are the norm, and the gatekeeping of information is thorough. You used to be able to at least keep up by reading committee and board minutes, but that was one of the first things that had to be destroyed and it was. Reports and minutes just don't contain the info about what was done, the transparency of the process and the steps that were taken to be fair and egalitarian. Committees are controlled and turned into tools to change policy so that the admin has much more power than is good for members. 

And members are mostly scrambling to make enough money to survive this economic disaster time, which has affected almost everyone except those who keep getting paid no matter what the membership is experiencing. The disconnect is dismaying and although I understand it, it's depressing to know that no one wants to tell the truth or get into the line of fire, since we see what happens.

Things are done in the dark that wouldn't stand the light of day. It seems that hats and my hats in particular were discussed at length for the last many months at the Standards Committee, but I was not notified. It has always been the practice that no one's business is discussed without their knowledge and notification, in a committee or at the Board level. Now it is common practice, and the minutes leave out the details and decision-making process so not even the committee members know what is happening. 

Members of the Standards Committee and others are asking me what process resulted in this new hat standard, and I have no idea. No one told me my (and the one other member) exception was being dissolved despite it saying right in the handbook that it was for the life of our continuous membership. I don't know if the Committee even knew they were doing that. I don't know anything about it. All of a sudden an important guideline was thrown out and there was no member input and no notification. I was distracted by a Notice of Concern that not even the Committee Chairs got to see, much less the committee members. 

It turns out that NoCs are no longer shared with the committee, but are summarized, however inaccurately that may be, or shelved if the GM doesn't want to forward them to the committee. This was never the practice in any of the past decades, that they were treated confidentially. They were generally printed with the minutes, if relevant to a number of members, and the discussion about them was shared in the minutes long before Board recommendations were made. And recommendations came from the committee meeting, not from the Chairs or any one person, with time built in so any stakeholders who would be affected were notified and consulted.

I saw with the proposed weapons policy that a member who makes knives was not made aware of the process, even though it would have greatly affected him, though he trusted he would be. I don't know if the policy was passed. 

I see with this new hat guideline that it was aimed at baseball caps but now broadly covers any and all hats sold by our members. It sounds simple, but a 50% assessment of member contribution is so loosely defined (it's not defined,) subjective, and open to interpretation that it may not be useful at all, and certainly can't be fairly applied to all the affected members.

What is worse, is that this now applies, apparently, to all products, even those that have been sold for decades. This is not how guideline changes were ever handled. It isn't right to change the rules, move the goalposts so to speak, and outlaw products that were already approved. So by rights, the two of us who had these lifetime exceptions should still be holding them and not be subject to this 50% assessment. Maybe that is why I haven't been notified. Maybe nothing has changed for me.

But this NoC that is not being transparently handled seems to give the lie to that. Why does anyone have the power to do this? 

The answer is simply because someone has taken power and is using the committees, board, and policy process as a weapon against members who are disagreeing with things and being vocal about it. 

The committee members don't know their process has been subtly changed and their powers have been dissolved. Most of them are new and a concerted effort has been made to drive anyone out who asks questions (two members that we know about have been either terminated or given an impossible process and walked away from the market, and there may have been more,) or brings up the past ways of doing things. 

This can't be comfortable for committee members, and many of them must be getting the inner signals that the process isn't fair. What can they do? 

Identifying a restored process for dealing with NoCs is one step. They are not confidential. Past managers have put them in the board packets, along with their explanations of actions taken, and certainly committee members should see the actual complaints before engaging in discussions of them. And the person targeted needs to see the complaint as well. While the complainant can be anonymous, that does not mean the complaint can be secret. Any member complained about has a right to see the charges. This is basic due process. We can't not have due process at the market. 

The fact that it appears that a guideline change was brought about in secret from this secret complaint should bother everyone. The pattern is evident. The weapons policy was brought up by an accusation that was never examined for truth...someone can say anything and there is not a process to verify it. This complaint about my hats apparently said I made a hat that said "No." That is false. 

I will repeat that I have no problem that more hats will be accepted into the market. I will be friends with those members just as I am friends with other members who make tote bags. We can talk shop. We can share resources. That is always how we have faced what other orgs might see as competition. We don't compete. We all have our own equal chance to make a success of ourselves. We are all happy to share the successes of each other.  

We need to hold tight to our values of fairness, transparency, and honesty in our community. It needs to be real. The current narrative is that the GM "has changed" and "has learned" and I will remind you that you can't change basic personality characteristics, though you can surely lie about it. There are so many false narratives it has become ponderous to keep up with them, and many decisions are based on them.

Let's demand honesty. We deserve it. How many other members are losing sleep and feeling isolated and not seen? I know it isn't just me.  

Joy was the main thing

 Lots of drama at market yesterday. Something we didn't hear about is that the Board cancelled November Park Blocks markets starting next year. It's two until 2031 when it will be three. It's a significant loss of selling days for members and will likely result in more competing events to attract our newly homeless members who just want to sell every week. None of my page of reasons not to do it were apparently compelling for the decision-makers. It does not serve the members.

But that was lost in the dismay of people with scented products, whose reactions ranged from staying home to plans to actually collect data, which would have been a good move before the decisions were made. As that is a health issue especially at Holiday Market, it's hard to support not making changes, but there are a lot of people potentially affected, including food booths, plant sellers, tea sampling, and many things that cause issues with the air that we commonly breathe. It's opening up things that could have significant expenses attached. 

And several people wondered if I will be able to still sell my hats. I don't have an answer for that. The online guideline still reads:  Commercial straw or felt hats, (or any commercially made hat,) either decorated or undecorated, may not be sold. All hat vendors offering work in contravention of this standard at the time of its implementation are allowed to continue selling them for the duration of their continuous membership. 

This is in a handbook labeled 2024. I have not seen the wording of what was passed by the Board or recommended by the Standards Committee, so will have to wait for the online handbook to be changed or the minutes to be provided next month. It wasn't in the Standards minutes that this was even a plan. I was not notified and don't know if anyone else who sells hats was...I received a letter from the Standards Co-Chair about my issue in particular that began in July, but nothing was mentioned about this wholesale change. Perhaps I was meant to be distracted, or it is just the poor communication and transparency we are supposed to be used to by now.

I don't fault the committee, who are hard-working volunteers whom I support. I'm sad for them that they don't probably know the history of this issue or what will potentially appear in our market that they will have to deal with. I am not worried about competition. I have never approached craft-selling with competitiveness and won't start now. We all just do our best in our niche we carve out and hope everyone else finds success as well. Competition is really not part of our makeup, generally. We just want to explore our artforms and sell what we make. It's pretty simple. 

But many of the Standards guidelines were crafted to prevent unfair competition, with handcrafted products which, as they are harder to make, need protection in the marketplace from commercially made items. There have always been gray areas that create inequities, and now there are more...it is rare that someone prints their own t-shirts, for instance. Digital printing has taken over that market, and you can see direct print done by computers on lots of items that were formerly handmade...tote bags, for instance. All of the stickers and patches and things that are ordered and put out for sale with only the work of the designer have replaced the hand-printed bumper stickers, etc. of the past. So one can assume that a digitally printed patch could be sewn onto a commercial hat, or that could even be ordered already complete, or commercially embroidered hats could be put out on the shelf, or even worse, commercially made fleece, knitted, crocheted, dyed bucket hats, or straw or felt hats will appear now, with a vague 50% contribution line drawn.

It's not going to be easy for the Committee to judge. Is design enough to meet that subjective 50%? When you look at a hat and I look at a hat, we will likely not agree on what that means. It can't just be the outward appearance of the item. When I look at my hats, I see the art preparation, the screen-making, the printing of one hat at a time, by hand, by me, with a little squeegee, and the retouching with tiny pens, brushes and markers that I have to do to get the finished version to look as close to perfect as possible. It is extremely rare that a hat I print is ready to sell without the re-touching process. I do a ton of handwork on my hat. But if you don't know this, you might think my rather simple design does not look like 50% of the finished item. 

I'm going to probably have to deal with this repeatedly going forward, as the committee does not seem to have knowledge about the process of printmaking, which is an ancient and old-school art form. The fact that is it being replace by digital printing is nice for the artisan perhaps but it is bad for the hand-crafted marketplace. It is of course not just hats but a lot of items, so we get to the gnarly "Consistency of Standards" world where opening one door leads to a hallway of others. We have had over 40 years of Standards Committee efforts to regulate these things and manage the protection of the hand-crafting artisan, so throwing out the history and starting now is going to be quite a hardship for people producing traditional crafts, not just prints but so many other types of craft items. 

Standards Committee already works very hard and this will being a lot more anxious people to their meetings, so I don't plan to make their job harder if I can help it. But I am ready to educate them about hand-printing if they want that. Changing technology does not demand changing standards. I sat at that table for many years, decades even, trying to help them articulate these issues and communication and transparency were essential. Surprising and shocking members with new limits does not go well. We would always make an effort to call in all of the affected stakeholders before crafting solutions, even when it was 100 jewelers to converse about charms. No, it was not easy. And when it was hats, four of us were inadvertently left out, thus the exceptions. This time pretty much everyone was left out, unless it was just me. 

New is not better. New is just new. Better is when people are more encouraged to thrive, more easily navigate the rules, and are allowed to be honest and ethical in what they do. As a community, we are wedded to honesty and ethics...it comes with the hand-crafting territory. Talk to any of us about it and you might be surprised how it plays out in every workshop where the production choices are made.

So you will hear more about this as the work of the Board is revealed, whatever it was. I hope the minutes are comprehensive and we aren't given false narratives about this too. 

I still have not had the inner courage to really examine the Code of Conduct revisions, which were also passed with a lot of secretive process, though I trust that since it took six months, a lot of diligence was applied. I don't necessarily trust the motive and what lies between the lines. Take a look at it yourself and see what you think might happen if you make a mistake or become the target of harassment. I will study it, when I have time, and see what I think might be some pitfalls. 

Policy is a living thing and always needs adjustment, and the makers of it need to be their best selves when they craft it, just like the artisans in our workshops. Ethics and good will and honesty are so important in our community. I wish I felt confident that we had that in place in all of our leaders. 

I remember what the mother of one of my friends wrote in my autograph book when I was five, something I have reread countless times and thought about deeply. She wrote "Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive. "

I told some convenient lies when I was little, to protect myself from my siblings and parents and find my way in a world of deprivation and bullying. Sometimes I was the bully, often the one crying. The dissonance was high as I learned about lies of omission, lies of commission, and all the sins and layers of sins taught in the Catholic Church. At some point, probably in my late teens, I decided honesty was the only way to go forward in life, though it was never easy to practice and is always hard to find in others. But I am committed to honesty. As a non-fiction writer, there is no other way.

There was also so much joy yesterday! One friend showed my photos of a cave system he and his fellow archeologists discovered, another told me about her potential new job, many others about their travels. One through-hiker bought hats for her support team...I assume she was taking a break from the Pacific Crest Trail before her final push. I imagine those hats in her cache near the final takeout. I'm excited for her. I'm excited for the printmaker who got to print and give away woodcuts at the Fiesta Cultural Friday night (he looked tired.) The City supported his costs so the prints could be given away as they dried. Must have been so fun. I've enjoyed him going from screenprinting to other more complex print techniques as his passion flows, something I always thought I would do but have probably run out of time for. He won't always be at market as he gets into shows where fine art is easier to sell. We lose many artists as they develop skills that take them into bigger circles and more success. 

For some reason, probably the hours of service I put in as a volunteer in the last two decades, I stuck with what I was already good at. I started teaching myself to make prints in the 1980s. I still do most things the same, hands-on way I did then. I don't use a computer much at all, certainly not for design, and I'm not going to start now. It's a trip of discovery to be getting near the end of my productive life. What will I do when I have to empty out my shop to install some kind of caretaker? Maybe go back to making things out of paper, painting silk, or something in Jell-O? 

Maybe I'll just keep writing things. I love it and it's important. There will never be enough truth-telling to replace Wendell Berry and Gloria Steinem and those others we are now losing. Fortunately, they wrote things down!