Taking a Moment

Spent this lovely day on the deck in the breeze drawing flowers for a design I'm doing for the Saturday Market staff who will have a booth at Fair this year. It's exciting to have a bigger presence at Fair, especially now, in the time when Fair is large in the world. I love the design but now that it's almost finished and I spent my day off on it, I feel trepidation.

It's probably not good enough. Nothing that I envision comes out as well as I imagine it, never has. I tell myself if I had ever overcome my beginnings and learned how to accept instruction and formal training, I'd be so much more skilled. Never studying art except by the doing of it, I can always see my awkwardness in my style. I'm not the type who would go to college now though; it isn't really even possible. I have to keep working as much as I can just to provide some kind of minimal security for when I can't work. No matter what I do I won't have enough resources, and it isn't like some credentials would allow me to charge twice as much for my work or anything. Someday I will take a little watercolor class when I am ninety if my hands still work.

Yesterday was a rough day, even as lovely as it was with so much packed into it. I've discovered that Sharpies aren't permanent and have had several people point out that my hats aren't weatherproof, particularly the logo ones that take so long to hand-color. I don't know what to do about it really, except tell people not to get them wet at which time they put them back and choose something else. It feels so bad to have an inadequate product. I will definitely replace any hat that has run, just bring it back. I'll figure out a solution for the problem too.


I know people didn't get what I was saying on my post about this new design. Very few thought it through to see the upside-down logo which is an artistic statement carried through 30 years from a joke for the OCF 20th. The peach upside down does look like a butt with a stick in it. It just does, so Mike and Ed made a kind of mean shirt for the 20th. It was hugely popular because people are always ready to criticize and there is always shit to sort through. For the 30th I made it into "Turning the Sacred Upside Down" which was my way of being philosophical about how we can integrate our darkside, and I still like that one. The 40th was a failure ("Still Seductive") and I had to give them away but this one for the 50th is rather beautiful and has the sincere message to Stay Grounded. Lovely leaves and flowers emerge from the peach when it lies on the ground and regenerates itself.

It's a good design but if you don't like the peach part it is apparently offensive. People also found the Sacred one offensive. As an artist I should be easier with my ability to offend but I am too much of a people pleaser and I want everyone's approval. I'll get over my disappointment. Forget posting designs on FB though. People don't know what they are saying. It's a fully finished product. I'm not going to make it bolder. I printed like 80 of them. I made it subtle on purpose. I did a complicated color blend that took forever. I wasn't asking for suggestions. But apparently I wasn't clear enough what I was asking. I was too subtle.

A lot of times when we are trying to be clever we fail. I can't be this sensitive if I am going to be powerful. This is a great time to toughen up. Leave the insecurities and triggerings behind and just forge ahead and do my work. At least the Elders shirt design is pretty good, if I don't point out all the flaws and inadequacies. It makes a lovely tote bag. I guess you shouldn't get it wet.The shirt says Elders on the bottom with the two dates, and I think they liked it. I think it's a good one, though not the best design I ever made as I wanted it to be.

Another thing that happened yesterday is that it was slow (we are suffering the loss of the many track meets and their tourism, and don't anyone forget it. They didn't care if we have a two year recession while they build that behemoth stadium which will be pie in the sky someday.) When it's slow we sometimes have some great conversations. Yesterday it was about UFOs that are real and the future that we almost can't discuss because it is way too real. It's hard to live with that terror, but I'm not moving to fucking Mars. We're going to save ourselves somehow if everyone will just get serious and stop flying and driving and ignoring the problems. Thank goodness for the young people.

So we're having a fun time chatting for the last two hours of the day and a guy comes by and asks for MAGA hats. Of course I politely say I would never make such a thing and then he lamely tries to continue, saying Andrew Jackson was a great human. By then we had all just wished him away and didn't even respond to that, but now I feel like he needed to be called on trying to bait us. Coming on our home ground, where we work, and saying racist things should be called out in some way. Ignoring was the best we could do so as not to spoil our lovely camraderie we were enjoying so much. Maybe I will think of a proper response to a racist coming into my space and deliver it the next time.

And I'm glad we didn't have a fight. Some bullies came to our meeting and it was intense but fascinating, because we didn't buy into their tactics. I feel like a year or two ago we would have been a lot more accomodating of bullying but this time we all knew what it was, exactly what it felt like and how not to feed into it. Skilled people responded appropriately and we gave some options to move forward and they slunk away without getting their way. It isn't over, but I really had to wonder if they had thought it through at all. Did they think they would bully us into their fantasy solution? They must have. I swear if some men don't evolve a bit faster we are going to start wearing our pussy hats every damn day. We did some nice healing after they left when we evaluated the meeting and left feeling clear at least. But a meeting that was going to be a good one turned ugly and that was sad.

At least we got the good news first. At least we got our work done and didn't suffer any lasting damage. At least we are clear that we support each other and our staff and we don't use unfair, unevolved tactics to work through our problems, we work in community to make decisions that will last and feel good. I'm proud of my community and what we've learned in the last 50 years, and keep learning.

I'm grateful for the good people that surround me and shaking off the residue from the bad. If I can just get a day on the deck once a week or so, with some flowers and a good book (I'm just finishing Horizon by Barry Lopez) and soon I will open Suzi's Vol. 2 and see what made it through the edits about me and some of my Fair friends and acquaintances. I'm proud of her and found the Museum exhibit spectacular and pretty comprehensive. They are lucky enough to have some big artifacts. SM doesn't really have those...not sure if any exist out in the world, but our lack of storage and our need for mobility for our event has resulted in not a lot of amazing junk like Fair has.

I was super interested to see how the framing worked since I am attempting to similarly frame Saturday Market history, and while I felt quite overwhelmed at how much I don't know about curating, I also realize that it won't be just me doing it eventually. If it gets to the stage OCF got to, there will be professionals involved. I can't imagine getting it done by next May, but you never know. I had a good start on it until I got too busy working. After Fair I can get back to it (and actually will be tabling for a day in the Historical Museum during the County Fair, on Wednesday July 24th.) Maybe I will get a chance to talk with curators and history nerds then and make some progress in how I envision it. Maybe I AM adequate to the task. Anyway I'm doing the task, so I will just have to damn the critics and keep doing the work.

A productive day, going from depressed and disappointed to strong again and ready for an intense week. Nothing that was supposed to be delivered last week arrived. I don't actually have anything to print this week, just one impossible piece of art and some things to order for art that will someday materialize. The end of June is going to be pure working hell so I will have to savor this day on the deck as I may not get another. The weeds will have their way with the garden and the lettuce will bolt before I can gather it in. I will try hard to get the garlic dug before Fair. I have found that if I don't, I can't find it after.

We shall see what the week brings. I guess I should take a minute and recognize that I made three amazing new designs and I still like them all. That's unusual. I printed a lot of shirts this week and will print a lot more, and will have some bucks at the end of it to put into my tiny savings account. Or buy wood and plumbing parts so I can forestall the sinking of my old houses into the ground they stand on. Good thing I'm so strong and youthful!

How to Begin Writing the Stories

Since the light wakes me up around five anyway, I've been going to bed early and reminding myself what a joyful time it was when I got up every morning to write. I produced an unpublishable novel and many short stories and essays during a period of a few years, about a decade ago, and I miss that richness. I worry hard that my aging process will make writing harder or impossible, so I've vowed to use my self-discipline to restart.

Both OCF and Saturday Market are asking for member stories, and I have a wealth of them. Writing them is the easy part; deciding how to write them for publication is much more difficult. They're personal, and some are confessional, and some thinly disguised as fiction to tell the more embarrassing or deeper emotional truths that I don't want to fully claim. I want to share them, but am I ready for what could follow?

I don't want much of that vulnerability: people passing judgements, learning intimate details, having access into my interior life. It's why I haven't been writing this blog much. I also don't want to make pronouncements as I tend to do about my reality, imagining it as universal, sounding like I have expert opinions that must be shared for the edification of the masses. I don't want to sound that confident in my own judgements. Mostly I don't want to get wounded.

It's these times. We're all so constantly in shock and ashamed to be white Americans with all the privilege we carry. We see all our collective sins, and we know we have to pay. The psychology is deep and I feel I know why we are not in the streets protesting every minute this corrupt regime and the turn our political life has taken. I feel manipulated no matter which way I move. I feel helpless and profoundly confused, and at the same time completely sure of my convictions and completely present and poised for action. Yet no action is clear.

And I am busy working. My refuge seems to be work, when I can be engaged, thinking, solving problems, and not trying to fix the seemingly unfixable. I can do the writing part of my tasks, but how can I help myself do the putting-it-out-there parts?

First, write. I put together one short piece today and reviewed some written a decade ago. I have more in my files to unearth and edit. Do I make a plan and release them one by one? Do I figure out some framing or parameters for myself to make them a collection that makes sense with a context, or let them go out unexplained, at face value? Do I simply give them away? Do I hand them over to be edited by others?

Or do I write all new ones with my present perspective, less personal ones perhaps, and set these aside? What is being asked for is not blog posts, not opinions, but actual stories. Can I be a storyteller, or am I stuck in this role as personal essayist and confessionaire? Will they lose their value if I take out all the insight and emotion I am actually proud of, in my egoist role as person who writes the best about these things. Dropping the ego is the first thing I have to work on, as well as the biggest. I'm in my own way, that's clear.

It's humbling to be needed, and I see that I run from it. It's a responsibility. I went out to pick berries and think through some of these arguments. What if I take the egoism all the way out to its limits and expose it right now: I am one of our community's most willing and able writers. Lots of honest people have told me I am good at it, and I believe them. I have a perceptive position in the interstices of our organizations, as one who has participated in lots of levels with a full heart and plenty of personal investment. So I am qualified. And I have the skills. And I'm of an age that allows me to use some applied wisdom, and maybe can do it without some of the pitfalls of my earlier writings.

Plus it brings me great pleasure. I'm really happy today at getting up early, having so much extra time. I got up because either a bug crawled into my ear and fluttered wildly or I have some congestion in my head that needs to drain, but it was enough of a cosmic message to make me sit up and type instead of reading our dreary newspaper. A lot of my vulnerability at the moment comes from the recent RG article about me, for which I feel explicitly and embarrassingly exposed, but look at how he titled it: Veteran vendor contributes to marketplace of ideas. Could that be any more affirmative of what I should be doing with this opportunity? It's my chosen path, and not by accident. I'm here because I have applied my combined skills to make my niche with my wit and intelligence.

The writer, Christian Wihtol, intuited and prised out a lot of my authentic self. He asked a lot of



questions I was happy to answer. While appealing to my ego in a sense, he also had a story to tell about the Market and those of us who are invested, and he told it well. Many have thanked me and come to support me and each time I read the article, it seems more benign. There's little to fear. I didn't tell my innermost secrets. He didn't say anything objectionable, except calling my booth a stall (we don't use that word, as we aren't animals and it isn't a barn...) but I didn't get around to telling him the forbidden ways to speak about craftspeople.

So my fear that something bad will happen with my writing is groundless, and anyway, why do I care? If someone thinks my style is annoying or my ego is showing like a soiled slip hem, so what? Will I even know? Won't that be balanced by the delight of another person who enjoys my story?

What's my real problem? I suppose it is losing control of my products...squandering my material by giving it away, pearls before swine. Easily remedied by asking for editorial control, or by more diligent editing so I don't give away points I might want to use. I sincerely doubt I will write a book about OCF, though I do plan to write one about Saturday Market. I don't, however, want to write a definitive history book about market, but actually have another plan. It would only add to a body of writing about the Market, not be the one and only book. The more available to not only outline, but to fill in the details of our experience, the better, from a historical perspective. My thoughts die with me, unless I put them on paper and share them while I can. If I truly have enough ego to think they are valuable, giving them away should cost me nothing.

So I have no good reasons to hang onto my writing and now, with the 50th arriving, now is the time. I want to feel compelled like I do today. I want to immerse in it and get all the deep feelings that make the brief week of Fair so rich for me. The more I write about it the better it gets.

So it seems I've decided. One first draft every morning, and one edit of an old piece, and some research into the blog posts for forgotten writings. Then start, soon, giving them away. Maybe do that today, send one. Push myself a little, for the common good. When someone reads mine, bad or good, they will feel a tiny push to send in their own. I want to read them, and I am not the only one.

Write. Pick berries, move the sprinklers, read, write. Turn the sacred upside down. Gaze at the beautiful summer light, go deep, feel satisfied. Cry. Write. Push "publish."

Same Old, and Also Brand New

Jell-O Goes Gold

I shared a seven-year-old post FB sent me, because it said a few things I have never stopped saying. Being engaged so much in crafting the elegant solution with so many people, lots of things don't change, and all of us, including me, need to keep reminding ourselves of how we get there.

It does matter what our process is. We do need to bring our best selves to every meeting. One person having an off day or engaging in self-serving behavior, or letting their fears overcome their manners, can have a devastating effect on people who are volunteering their time and energy. Every time someone goes off, everyone else goes home with the task of self-examination, checking on their own thought processes and priorities, and working on their skills and internal processes, just to get back to where they started at the beginning of the meeting. Careless words and actions are what drives volunteers away.

My two main membership organizations (Saturday Market and Oregon Country Fair) are full of visionaries, hard workers, practical planners, and dreamers. Our whole impetus starting out so long ago (hard to grasp the fifty year lifespan, already) was to create a better life experience, to share our talents, to work together without self-interest for the common good. Many of us were in our twenties and thirties, and if you were there, you remember why we needed an "alternative society." Mainstream reality was grim. Our generation of young men was being wiped out in Vietnam, brutally involved against their wills in a corrupt and terrifying war of imperialist domination (we had the draft and the lottery for it.) The government was clearly crooked and grasping (we had Nixon and then Reagan) and we had been collectively traumatized by the murders of our visionary leaders, the two Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King Jr, and many of the Black Panther leaders, who were trying to feed children and protect the lives of their community. Our country was described as divided in two, and everyone was fighting, even at the family level. It always seemed manufactured and phony, and what stuck in our minds was the advice to The Graduate: "Plastics." What a metaphor.

My cynical perspective sees everything differently than I did then, as history repeats itself but in ever-darker ways, but we have learned a lot over the years, and we have taught our children well. In my little corner of the alternative society, we're well established in experienced process, we practice peace, and we value self-assessment and education, and there's a lot of wisdom in every gathering. Some among us are excellent at cutting through the crap. One of my friends nailed it at a difficult meeting when she pointed out an absence of something basic, personal responsibility. We live with that every day as self-employed people, with our survival on the line with each action we take.

We aren't as flummoxed by bullies and gaslighters as we were in the past. Collectively the whole world is much less willing to tolerate coercion and negative framing and divisiveness, and people are much braver about speaking clear truth and leaving their fears and confusions outside the room as they focus on actual problem-solving. Crafting the elegant solutions comes a little easier now. Not that it isn't a constant challenge.

Facebook discussions have both facilitated and destroyed process but reading so many threads that are open to everyone has me convinced that on balance, these rather warped forums of participatory democracy are helpful. We can identify behavior patterns, illogical arguments, trolling, and inspiration. When people turn the conversation with positive framing, you can almost hear the cheering. When someone comes to trash things, they rarely succeed. Ranks close and their comments are either argued down to shreds or they sit like a turd on a platter at the end of the thread. People reveal themselves in ways that wouldn't happen in a live meeting. We can edit our comments when we say something that doesn't sound right. We can drill down into the issues and bond or identify areas we have to work on.

It can be too much. We still have to get in the room together and be vulnerable as we take step after step toward naming and solving the actual problems. But often the myths we carry are shown to be such, in the online process, and we can share that perspective and re-right the ship. We're more in charge of our own process than ever, at the same time being more bombarded by distraction and intentional obfuscation than ever.

Country Fair, with it's larger population of stakeholders and many more FB pages, does a lot more of this online processing then we do at Market. We actually do ours on Saturdays, since we meet there so frequently. Sometimes you could frame it as gossip, but I see it as the informal process that facilitates the formal process. We tend to stay away from online processing, (and I'm grateful for that) as our population is smaller enough to interact more in person throughout the year. You don't necessarily have to be a committed volunteer who goes to meetings to share your perspective with your friends and neighbors. I am convinced the networking that goes on during the day on Saturdays is invaluable to our work. We get discussion time and we reach a lot more of us who aren't online, including both the new or infrequent sellers and the regular every-week members on the Park Blocks. I especially like the morning set-up time and the 3-5 afternoon time for the easily shared communications that we can do ongoing during the season.

Of course the offseason is a different story. A lot of us go into retreat mode and turn our energies to other things, and the core group of people who are working on Market issues is smaller. But still, when we come together to work on our tasks and decisions, people bring skills. We slog through things that take time and care. We can't always be efficient and quick with how we work things through. Like with Fair, our event comes up quickly, faster than we are ready for it, and at the same time we can hardly wait for it. We feed so deeply on the actual gatherings. There's a thread right now on an OCF page where people are writing what they are looking forward to doing at Fair. It's as diverse as the population and illustrates well how many kinds of contributions there are, and how they all fit together to make the others possible.

Sure, there are always going to be people who cause other people to do make-work around them, who don't pull their weight, who complain and blame and make mistakes. Plenty of people try to eliminate process to just get the job done. It was easier when we were pioneers creating things for the first time, when individuals could exert more personal power and get approval for it. We have to be more careful now to create group buy-in, to get consent, to stop from acting long enough to make sure it will be the best way to get to the solutions. It can be frustrating, but we still have to do it, or pay the price by doing things over or repairing the damage.

We have always valued consensus, but it takes time. Now we lean toward it, but we don't always take the steps to find it. We increasingly go to majority rule, which is flawed in so many ways, and furthers division, to my mind. It fosters coercion and domination. It short-circuits the careful decision-making process. It forces the consensus-building out of the meetings into the informal networks, the FB threads, the Market neighborhood discussions. It's the way it goes. It makes our experienced, traditional leaders more important than ever, and it's unfortunate that they are often aged.

Young or old, people with developed skills at building consensus to make morally right, thoughtfully crafted, fair and equitable decisions should lead the process. Loud and demanding voices have their place, but it shouldn't be at the head of the table. Change can come, but not at the expense of what has been so carefully built.

Everybody has their fantasy of what our shared reality is like. All of the many thousands of Fair-goers have their perfect Fair in mind and they try to experience it every year. Everyone who comes to Market has a vision of what it is that serves them in whatever ways they need it to. None of these are perfectly correct for all of us, none of them are perfectly the truth.

But in the collective reality, they each play a part. Each of us has the task to envision the best possible practices and the best possible experience, and work toward it. We do this with amazing power and force, and each event is an explosion of this manifestation of love. Every Saturday, every July, we are stunned by the beauty and joy we create together. Sometimes we have to slog through some mud to get there, but our collective vision remains clear and bright. I am so grateful for that, and so in awe of how many people try so hard to create it.

It's not easy to make a beautiful vision come true every day. Now in our traumatized political state, it's harder than ever in my lifetime. But it's happening, and happening harder and harder as the daphne and violets bloom and the weeds take off. I'm thrilled for myself that I have the Jell-O Art Show as my annual vehicle to illustrate that. I hope you have something similar and a way to express your creative and dramatic self that includes some silliness and some hugging and some singing and some brilliantly colorful ways to clear away the grime. I'm excited that my vision is still refresh-able.

I had been feeling a little old and in the way. It's kind of a default forced on us as we wrinkle and our disks degenerate inside us. We slow down. But this has its important place. We have more time to reflect, and take in the wisdom of others. We have the undeniable advantage of historical perspective that can so enrich the enthusiasm and energy of youth. We get to support instead of lead. We get to sit back and be satisfied, and embrace joy and contentedness instead of just acting and doing. We get to set the example and bring forward what we've been taught. We're part of the continuum in a new way.

We're all playing a part in this drama. Make them laugh. Make them cry. Touch their hearts. Watch them play. Applaud. What a world! Thanks for staying in it, even when you feel discouraged.

Living in Community

Woke up this morning, late for me (9:00 am!), and remarkably, surprisingly, anxiety free. I can ramp it up, when I'm ready, but I wanted to note my sense of freedom and find ways to expand it before I dip back into all of those areas where I can't seem to escape the stress.

Standing on the Park Blocks on Saturdays (and Tuesdays) with my creations, trading them for money and compliments, is always a pleasure for me, despite the emotional load it carries and the uncertainty and exposure that comes with it. Yesterday it rained all over many of my hats, as I had opted for the sand-bag-free umbrellas instead of the heavier pop-up with weights. Wrong choice for the 20%-plus rain probability; it was a gamble and I knew it, and I lost. I looked unprofessional and I have more labor and some loss with the wet goods, but I wasn't very upset by it.

I'm quite sure I wasn't upset because I had grounded myself really hard this week in what makes me who I am in this community: our shared values, and our alternative culture. This was spurred by several things; some were personal, some came from watching the City Council meetings (I keep up with them by video, and thank you City of Eugene), and some were seasonal. It's now on the winter side, while I prefer the summer side, in the Willamette Valley. That means I get cold, constrict, and have to use much more gear to walk and bike around, and I can't sit out on my deck and read, which is my chief source of escapist pleasure. I did buy myself a fake mink blankie and some hot tie-dye longjohns and I have an excellent supply of warm socks, so I am confident I will survive the harsh winters we seldom get around here and will be able to manage the advent of Jell-O Art season when we finish off the Holiday Market. My routines are solid and I like bean soup, but I still clench up when the plants die off and I have to close the windows.

Humor aside, I spent a lot of emotional labor in the past year, or maybe several years. I can't see back to a time when I wasn't carrying the extra weight of my volunteer positions (which are a few too many.) Some of that was the brew of cognitive errors I lump into the Over-Responsibility Syndrome that in me, convinces my pysche that I have to fix everything I see as not functioning optimally in my small and greater communities. Obviously that adds up to me not functioning optimally. But as a leader I do share in these responsibilities to be part of the solutions and less a part of the problems, and I take that very seriously. The degree of how seriously increases with the amount of discomfort I feel, in a spiral of the-worse-things-get-the-worse-I- get. I have my issues as a flawed person, and you've probably heard more about those than you need to hear.

But sometimes I get a reset, and I got one this week! What a joy, and what a luxury! I knew what I needed to do and say, and said and did it, and set a reasonable goal (or metric as they like to say now) to measure it, which was met, and I allowed myself the sense of relief and ease I needed. It may be brief, as I immerse into the volunteer tasks this week, such as voting for the OCF Board and typing up a few sets of meeting minutes, but I do want to savor it today. I give the credit to a few individuals, and I'll keep this vague, as well as the ways I was able to use that ease yesterday to listen well to a few in my community who needed some kind attention, because that's not the point and you know how long and detailed I can be.

The point I want to remember is that when I get what I need, I can give others what they need. It's that simple in structure. It's complex in action, and takes a lifetime of learning, but I can trace my bits of knowledge back to key people in my life who have given me the benefit of their wisdom. One person mentioned her intention to build community; at that time we were talking about Family School and why it was created (to establish a functional, deep interface between home and school for our children). One person relentlessly built community every Saturday in her little addresses in our Market newsletter. One person has spent years dropping meaty, cogent phrases on me in our casual talks, that have spurred my blog explorations and framed my storytelling so that I could share it.

One person said she had learned a particular skill set because she saw that we would need it. A little panel on the Sixties at the LCHS led me to open my archives and spread out my tangible contributions from my craft universe, which began when I came to town as a traveling signpainter in 1975 and found the Saturday Market. My first client was Humble Bagels, right as they were beginning. I dropped into the alternative society of Eugene and our area because of the almost accidental fact that my Aunt Lud and Uncle Homer lived here. I've been immersed in it since then.

Thinking about Kesey Square naming initially made me defensive about our Alternative Community, since RG comments are so mean and I resent being labeled, particularly in negative, untrue ways. Kesey wasn't really a hero of mine (and someday I'll re-tell the story of being nearly run over by Furthur-II) but I recognized his greatness, and I do believe that common usage has named the Square now and it should stick. I kind of agree that we should shift our thinking about the center of our city to the Park Blocks, if that doesn't endanger my uses of it. That's what our founders intended, and it's more suitable than Kesey, architecturally, and I had to agree with Councilor Yeh that we don't need any help in naming places after white men, but really the branding has been done by the people, so we can let it be. I don't have a better name in mind.

But in feeling defensive about the community, I ran through my speeches in my head. I often compose speeches that I'd like to give at the Public Forum but am too chicken to deliver. I know I owe it to the City Council to come out of the kitchen and let them know how involved I really am with what they do and say. I've been watching every meeting and worksession for over two years now. I take notes. I print out the materials and archive them. My small interest area is the Park Blocks and downtown developments, with a side of history starting with the first inhabitants (in detail) and I am actually quite an expert by now on my many theories and analyses of what our city and community is up to. But I communicate that to a smallish group of people through my task force emails and my blogs, and mostly stay kind of quiet about it.

I don't want to be wrong. I want to be a good leader and help us get to the elegant solutions and I want to be extremely careful to be logical, rational, and helpful. Keeping quiet and studying hard is a good tactic for me, but I see that the Councilors need to know I care, and the community needs to know what I know and think. I get stymied by trying to speak for others, and the difficulty of speaking only for myself when I'm so enmeshed through my many positions of responsibility.

Someone suggested this week that I merely identify myself by my role when I say something. Am I speaking as an equal member? Am I granting myself some positional authority, such as being an officer of a corporation, or a member of a Board, or a Committee Chair? Am I speaking as a citizen, a homeowner, a mother, an elder, a white lady, or as a human without labels? Can I speak without any labels? It's pretty impossible for me to separate my roles. I'm generally speaking from the compendium of them all. I'm me because of all these things. I can't not be me.

So if I go to speak to the City Council, will they see me as the voice of Saturday Market, even if I provide a disclaimer? I think I can speak positively for the Market, but so do the people who say outrageous things to city leaders about how we feel about the FSP. I don't agree with them, and I don't want them speaking for me, because I have grown to see how that thing over there works within our community and it isn't all bad. I know and love some of the drummers. I see how the newly hatched artists and crafters can't quite make it across the street to join Saturday Market, and I want them to build up to having that chance. I see how desperate some people are to make a single dollar with the skills and damage they have accumulated. I am not a mean person who thinks things should be swept clean and trashed instead of supported. Let me repeat again that any fixes over there have to be a community solution, with buy-in from the users, the neighbors, the public entities, the social-service agencies, and all of us who are involved and affected by the use of the northeast block. This will not be an easy solution or a simple process, but anything less will be a tragedy. That needs to be heard.

So I feel I should counter those opinions spoken in public by some who would represent me. I don't label people as "druggies" or "hippies" (though I have warm feelings about that label) or any other designation if I can hear myself. I resent labels for me and I resent them for others. I hate so much this rising atmosphere of hate and intolerance and I should be one of the people speaking loudly to counter it. That needs to be heard.

Park Blocks: big complex subject and all my study does not make me enough of an expert to go tell the City what to do. Changes to the Park Blocks are a community conversation. I'm certainly a part, but I am not here to deliver pronouncements and answers, though I have definite opinions. It is a process. I am engaged in that process. I will fight to stay engaged, but I won't fight the process or the other participants. Framing it as a fight is always a mistake. I will trust the process, and the participants, to be good listeners and to trust me as well. I hope the Council knows I'm here. I might owe it to them to remind them. I know they feel vulnerable sometimes that they are out there by themselves trying to make decisions without adequate citizen involvement. They would welcome me at the public forum. I could make a three-minute statement that would be helpful.

What I'd try to say today would be that when I got here, in 1975, I found a fairly well-established group of amazing, caring people who were trying to work on a better, more stable corner of America that would offer the space for growth: sustainable, thoughtful, ethical growth within the lessons we had learned from the Fifties, the Sixties, and the rebuilding of the American psyche that was so damaged by those decades. The assassinations, the lies, the Vietnam War, the actions of the CIA and FBI, and the betrayal of solid human values needed a huge healing. We applied our damaged selves to the task and we built things here. We sold our goods at Saturday Market and OCF and we volunteered at White Bird and we worked at the Homefried Truckstop and the newspapers and we talked and we cared and we built. We bought the dilapidated post-WWII properties and the old 1920's houses and we rebuilt them and made the downtown and surrounding neighborhoods valuable again. We created schools and clubs and groups and neighborhoods and we built a wonderful solid core that got us through the depression of the 80's, replanted our forests, re-invested in our downtown, and we did it with our open hearts and our deep desire for a better world. We're still here, most of us, still doing our best.

We did this next to all the people already here, the loggers and the farmers and the people who didn't welcome what we brought and built, and through the decades we proved our worth and our dedication and we not only survived, but we thrived. We built treasure together and we won't rest and say it's enough. We will do this until we fall over, and then we'll do it from our beds. There are so many shining examples of this kind of person that you all know many, many of them, living and not. We have a stunning, living legacy in Eugene and Lane County of a society that has embraced the place and helped to work to make it one we are so proud of we can barely see it in it's entirety. We've invested our lives in this.

You might say we take it for granted. I'm here to tell you that every day that I stand on the Park Blocks, every single Tuesday and Saturday, I hear from someone their deep appreciation of our town and their recognition of our hard work. I should tell this to the City Council and the Lane County Commissioners. Perhaps my problem is really that I feel it so deeply, and it is so much a vital part of my being, that I am fairly sure I would dissolve in tears as I try to explain that fathomless love.

I don't want it to feel trivial. I don't want it to fall on any deaf ears. I don't want to compete for attention with the rest of us, the 350 people, the climate change activists, the advocates for the unhoused, the people fearful of losing the equity they have built as I have built mine. It's all of a piece. We're all together in this, whether or not we agree about the details. We have the unity we wish to see.

We've been saving our world all this time. The Vietnam story brought this back to me in waves. My friends the Marines, the protestors, the liberators of love and women and people of color, we're together in this. We haven't put down our tools and we aren't going to fall into the chaos that's being pitched at us. We have got it going on.

So thank you all, and thank you for reading and listening. Thank you for what you do. Keep seeing this big picture. Keep the faith. Love what you do, notice the moments, and love harder. Let it be.

Let it be Kesey Square. It's not like you can stop people from using their Free Speech. It's not like you would want to. That isn't what people want. We want our human needs met. Let's start there.

Every day.

Scribe Tribe Will Feed You

I want to encourage a few of you to step up and try out scribing for a committee or taking on the Board Recording Secretary position. Let me relate how it improved my Fair experience. I’ve been a boothperson for about forty years, and did my share of complaining. I was a crafter way before Facebook, and complainers rarely had any listeners, so my complaints never resulted in anything but a mounting dissatisfaction on my part, which culminated in extreme frustration with my forced stay on Monday night of the Mud Year. I got stranded on site with my giant wet pile of goods and no one really cared…but like all Fair experiences, it had a silver lining. I spent a lovely, quiet night camped out in my bare booth with my dried fruit and the minimal amount of things I was willing to unpack, and I hope you all have Fair moments as sweet as those. After I wrote my incensed letter to “them” which I knew better than to mail, I got to work thinking about how to shift my Fair life to one that fit better. I knew some volunteers, so I had a clue that maybe we had more common ground than I thought.

I decided no one “saw” me, and that was my own fault. I read a call for scribes and that fit my skill set, so I volunteered, trying a few positions out until landing at Craft Committee. A whole world opened up that turns out to be endlessly fascinating and completely satisfying on so many levels. What might sound like a thankless task is indeed a rare opportunity to serve in a sacred manner and show your love for Fair through right action.

The scribe’s duty at a meeting is to witness and describe with honesty what occurred and what was decided. This can be as simple as you like. Often minutes contain only the most vital info such as the motions passed and who showed up. It is not necessary to include all of the discussion and who said what to whom and how that felt. You put yourself in a position that is in the meeting and of the meeting and try to portray the meeting in a helpful manner. You learn to frame things neutrally, be clear and concise, keep your emotions and opinions and perspectives to yourself, and serve the best interests of the committee and of the Fair.

This is super training for many areas of life and while it takes a little organizational skill in some ways, the most necessary part is that you don’t have to do the work of the committee (although you can choose to pitch in if you want). You don’t have to vote or even take a position. It’s better if you don’t. You do have to attend the meetings, and that’s a commitment, but I’ll bet lots of you are pretty interested in what happens in some of those committees, and here’s your chance to get in there and find out. You would be intrigued and amazed to see how much does get done, and how expertly and inspiringly it can be accomplished.

We at OCF have the most stellar community activists and thinking, feeling people who come from so many areas of the bigger regional networks. Powerful, loving, incredible people come together in these rooms and try to solve problems, look ahead, heal breaches, plan for improvements, and do the work of the organization and the event. You don’t have to work during the event, but it keeps you tuned into the Fair year round, and you will be really important in a small way that will benefit you and others.

Being a witness to group process is endlessly fascinating and you can help the committee function by being an organizational tool. You keep them aware of what they did at the last meeting, and the one last year, and what is coming up in the yearly round of work. You track their work so they can communicate it to others, and you document progress so we aren’t always spinning our wheels. You have a calming force as a witness, and functional behavior and cooperation will increase. The Chair will not have to be the only one with tasks, because your minutes will record the assigned tasks as people volunteer for them, and remind them of what they said they’d do. Phrasing the business of the committee in neutral, clear language takes the heat out of many discussions and gets to the meat of proposals, conclusions, and solutions. You might be amazed how much more work the committee will be able to do with your assistance. We will all move forward in much healthier ways!

At Fair, we do have a detailed style of minutes that serves our membership organization, but it doesn’t mean you have to write down every word and then type it up. Technology rules. I use a voice recorder to supplement my notes, and it’s easy to type notes and construct the minutes from them as you go if you have a laptop. I personally like a lot of detail, but that’s a style choice and many committees would appreciate a less-complicated report, so you would work with your committee to tune your work to their needs. There are tons of resources online to help you with the structure and content of good minutes for a membership nonprofit. It is required that a public record be kept, and you will be serving an essential legal function for OCF, which will make many of us proud of our professionalism.

You do not need to be able to spell these days, and if you can’t type there is probably a work-around for that too. Maybe it would be a great idea to learn to type better, and this will help. Maybe you really don’t think you have the skills, but I’m guessing there are several people among us who could help with that, Randy being high on that list. You don’t have to start from scratch in an organization that is almost fifty.

The Board has explored the idea of their being some kind of reward or exchange for this service, but I’m here to tell you that it is its own reward. You get thanked a lot! The office staff and the Board and your committee grow to love you. Everyone who has searched the website in vain for what is being done here or there will love you too. You will be pitching in with a most meaningful, continuing task that will only require a few hours a month. Think about it.

Attend a meeting of the committee you are interested in serving. Try taking notes in your seat and see if you like it. I find it helps me stay interested in even the longest repetitive discussions, because psychology, human relations, group process and consensus building are laid bare. That person who always talks about herself, and goes off topic? Your meeting framing can help her focus too. You can say cool things like “There’s a motion on the floor,” if the Chair forgets to say it. You will learn things you never knew you wanted to know. I think it is my favorite thing about going to meetings, to frame things in a helpful manner for forward progress. If I weren’t doing it for five different groups, I would take Randy’s job myself. So if you can read and write, this is your chance to step in. Let this be your formal invitation and your permission to be part of the glue that holds our community together. Take a bite of the Peach!

Thank you to all of the scribes, ordinary heroes.

The Illusion of Choice

That's our modern condition. I just watched a Facebook spot about the fact that almost all eyeglasses and their delivery systems are owned by the single company Luxxotica, and read in the paper how Monsanto and Bayer are merging. We all know this is how things are going in the giant world of conglomerates. It's the kind of cultural thing that people feel helpless about it and even when "Adam Ruins Everything" tells us the facts, we tend to kind of file that away and keep going as usual. Extrapolate that to climate change, politics, and you can make your own list of the ones you choose to live uneasily with. I have to buy glasses.

Boy that has an effect on our psyches, though. I'm reading what is for me a heartbreaking book, the new novel Barkskins by Annie Proulx, which is a book so well written I can only hope to understand its structure and the expertise she has applied to literary fiction. It's character after character through hundreds of years, and we watch development work through their lands and lives and see how helpless they are to prevent losing what they treasure, how they participate it for smaller reasons of their own. I think we accept that as a condition of our human lives now...instead of things getting better and better, we will lose piece by piece until we are left with nothing. Maybe that's just age talking. I've seen some sad situations lately that underscore why people say things like love is all that matters.

There's very little else you have control over but a slice of your emotions, and choosing love is a pretty good adaptation to that if you can hold onto that illusion. I let my cynicism loose on love, having tried on lots of forms of it and come up lacking in skill and expertise to keep that glamour drawn over that hard reality. Honesty always forces me down into realism and I see romantic thinking and wishfulness underneath, and to me it looks quite thin. Not that I think you shouldn't keep working on it. It really is all that matters, because bringing love to the human situations is the best we can do to get through them. Giving up on that doesn't give us much in the salvage pile.

I admire people who can form a solid partnership and draw strength from it. Must be such a comfort. I see it kind of like religion, something that feels real and makes you feel strong, strong enough to keep going and keep trying and rest easy when there is nothing else to try. You hold the person's hand and get some peace and safety there. You promise each other, and hope you can keep the promises. Everyone should have that comfort, because life is hard, but alas. Lots of us don't.

I like to say your cynicism won't protect you. My cynicism does me no favors, but if anything is my religion, it's honesty, and I can't seem to get my cynicism out of my honest calculations. So my trust is compromised. I don't feel as safe as I'd like and I hardly trust anyone...really deep down. I trust people who are really honest with me, who are humble enough to not be prone to drawing the glamour veil over whatever is between us. I trust hard workers who speak directly and look within before they cast about for blame. I do have such people in my life, thank goodness. I have others who work toward that. Then there are plenty who don't get it and don't want to and don't want me to bring it up. Be positive! Assume the best!

Sometimes, I suppose, honesty is not the best policy. Maybe it's the base of a slightly rose-colored version of the concept or impulse or thought and maybe the cheery exterior is helpful. This is getting a little too theoretical to check for fact...what exactly am I talking about? I'm afraid to say.

Unleashing my cynicism isn't going to get my community through the hard times we're in. All of my artisan communities are having problems with our realities...maybe not huge problems, maybe mostly our normal problems: attacking our leaders, losing perspective, letting our selfish sides out, saying things without thinking of the possible effects, hurting each other, trusting the wrong people. Trying to keep the love spread over it all when the glamour has some spiky nails poking through is a constant effort. OCF just went through another huge upheaval which is how decisions seem to have to be made in the age of Facebook and too many people to fit in a room. It gets ugly but a few key people always know what to say...and lots of people are still able to listen. Love for each other can certainly be a deep and real emotion.

Obviously the TV and music offerings of our day have given us some terrible examples of how to behave and how to treat each other, with the glorification of the thug culture and "getting mine" and we all see every day ways that well-meaning, good souls are taken advantage of, crushed, and ruined, by desperate, blind predators who have no idea why or what they are doing, thrashing through their pain. I don't think it has ever been different really, but when the population was smaller and we didn't have media so entertainment-oriented, it was less obvious and in our faces. We could live in our illusions and get away with it. It's harder now to do that. I was walking home last night after dark and passed a few people...no one scary, though I've had the habit of crossing the street to avoid passing large men as a rule. Last night I didn't, so I took a closer look at the dark shapes and worked with gut feelings, and everyone was cool. People were walking their dogs, exercising, smoking, or just going somewhere like I was. Some were afraid of me, with my backpack, bag of bread, roll of posterboard falling out of my open pack. I looked awkward, and I actually tripped on the sidewalk and fell on my face, cursing loudly. Damn fucking sidewalk. I guess I wasn't lifting my feet enough. The worst aspect of it was no one came to help me. I didn't need it, and there wasn't anyone close enough anyway, but I thought that if they heard my loud cursing and saw my confusing load of stuff, they wouldn't come near me. They would back away, because I would look like a drunk or someone else who could be dangerous. I felt that loneliness of having pain that no one cared about.

I got some scrapes and bruises but am fine and made it home, but I did remind myself that the universe likes to send me lessons (how I draw my glamour veil) and here was one about judgement and stereotyping. Everyone who falls down deserves a helping hand. The poor woman who was arrested behind the Tuesday Market had spent her morning desperately weeping, spreading her damp clothing and towels out on the rock walls in her cubby, and she deserved better than to have her belongings put into black plastic bags and hauled away. Who knows if she will recover any of them, or need to? Maybe that's what people on the street expect now, but what I expected was that some of the people who watched this happen might gather them up and put them back into her pack and save them for her...I wanted to do that myself. No one did. I saw another person spend the day doing personal grooming of all kinds, trying to hide herself by the same wall and pretend she had privacy, in the privacy of her black hoody and pants. A hundred people saw her and ignored her, and she ignored all of us. My gut drew me so strongly to give her something, money, food, a word, something...but I did not. We exchanged a glance or two, hers suspicious and defiant (I imagined), mine full of dismay and indecision. I didn't want to invade the little privacy she was trying so hard to create.

I told myself to be careful, to be cautious, to keep working and not take on things that were not my business. Down the street at the federal courthouse were hundreds of people not being cautious, speaking out and supporting our kids who are working for climate change repair. I know people are working for homeless advocacy too. I know lots of people are working hard for exactly what I want: less judgement, more justice, finding safety and privacy for those who can't buy it for themselves, helping. Giving the comfort of a hand and a partner to those who don't get that, aren't successful at arranging that for themselves.

So I have a lot of work to do. We discussed how to be a good partner at the Task Force yesterday, and it helped a little, and we worked together very well to take some steps together as a membership to articulate our position and protect our needs. I'll keep the veil over my cynicism but it hasn't alleviated in the least. The set up has been deliberate and the deal is laid out, and it's not like we have any real power when millions of dollars are on the table. We have the illusion of choice. We're going to make the most of it.

We're going to assume the best, and step our way carefully into the inevitable and keep doing what we can to use our own crayons to color it good for us. I can't tell you all will be well, that it will be what you want. No one knows exactly how these downtown developments will play out in detail, but they will play out. It will be "what the community wants". Let's just hope that it isn't all what the development community wants. Let's keep working and bringing in our people and putting forward our vision of what our alternative community wants, too. We are an important cog in the wheel. There's no way to stop the train, but we can keep helping to draw the map, and keep working on ourselves and our friends and neighbors to make the best choices we can. Whether we like it or not, we are all in this together, and it is where we are. Fear less, love more.

Getting back to Life as Usual

Post-Fair exhaustion was long-lasting this year, as everything I took out there came back damp and I spent the rest of the week hauling everything out into the sun to get dried out. Happily it was sunny and I got it all (okay, mostly) done. I managed to organize enough for Market and had a record day, again. My sales are up so much this year I keep thinking the bubble will break, but for whatever reason I am having a lot of success. Some might say after 41 years of Market I have figured it out, but a lot is just luck. Apparently my hats have become a Fair "thing" in that people come to get one every year and kids have it on their list too, and lots of young people at Market have found something they want to buy, supplementing the tourists who are always delighted to find useful bags and gifts for men and dog-sitters and items low-priced and easy to pack. That makes me so grateful I cannot even express it. I raised the price of the hand-colored hats and people didn't even blink. I think the items I offer are so clearly not the mall-wear that is available, the craft community is really reaping the rewards of the homogenization of commodities. People want real things. We have them.

Today is my first rest day and there are still lots of things on my list. I'm not really resting. I have one set of minutes to type which is why I am here procrastinating and ordering my thoughts. I am about to actually take a vacation to a family reunion back east and that will be a good test of my resting capabilities. Generally I am not good at it, but I plan to leave my laptop at home and not even look online. Should be great!

I felt that the theme of Fair was that everything good had a barb to it, every rose a thorn, if you will. My sales were over-the-top good, but I am liquidating my clothing lines so selling it all off at cost, more or less. Some things were sold for less than I paid for them, but keeping them for several years already devalues them so all I can do about it is learn to spend and work smarter for the future. I don't transition very well; I tend to overproduce when things are good and then end up carrying that excess for way too long. I finally took the kids shirts this year after two years and most of my kids shirts' customers didn't find them. The bargain baskets are hidden and not really accessible, and much of what is in there isn't desirable unless you are a 2X or just need a clean shirt no matter how it fits or looks.  But women's longsleeves are gone now and the other types of clothing greatly reduced in volume. I am thinking of not taking any of it to Holiday Market at all, which would be quite a change. Nothing but hats and bags, which will of course fill the space and might allow a bit more room for people.

I don't like being the seller of cheap shirts so it will be a relief when all of it is finally gone but it will take another Fair at least. I reprinted the unofficial logo shirts like the Geezer and they sold astonishingly well on the one day I had them out, so rather than reprinting them for the last time, I will probably do it again. I hold on too long to everything, and am constantly nostalgic for shirts from the past, having a hard time letting go of even the Fish Tie shirts first sold in 1984. Clearly I am finished printing that stuff. I am finished printing a lot of things. Next big step will be to reclaim the screens so there is no way to print them again.

My body clearly told me I can not continue to overwork that hard every year. The barb in the good sales was the pains and suffering. I don't want a life that insists on painkillers and leads to surgeries. I want to use this great sales year to finance somehow a less-successful sales year in the future when I can dial in only what really works and jettison some of what only kind-of works. I have to stay so focused for the several months before the Fair that everything else has to yield, including relationships and social activities, and I know nobody knows how that really works for me. I really have zero time for anything but work from about March to now, every year. Every day. My few hours in the evenings that I would watch TV or read were mostly enforced by the fact that my body refused to allow anything productive, either my foot too tender to walk or my arm numb and protesting. My denial of these pains is a sometimes startling lack of concern for my future and my present. I know I'm not the only one who deals like this, but I'm the only one in my life who is going to pay for it, in some unknown way that I really must start to calculate. Working on that.

So the biggest barb was that I neglected one of the relationships that facilitated my work the most, and I'm guessing it's ruined now. It had been troublesome for awhile but I guess neither of us was willing to break it until forced. We can try taking out the OCF piece and see what is left, if we can find a way to talk to each other again. It will eventually settle out I suppose, but I feel like the thing I need to learn is not to push these things to destruction but to address them before they explode. The avoidance process ends this way often enough. The overworking leads to the avoidance. I see my responsibility in it, and the ways I am programmed to follow that course, but that doesn't help much. Changing behavior patterns is so hard! I'm going to need all that community support that is so available in my Fair Family.

Fair Family is so real and full, but it doesn't come easy and it has to be flexible. Just wanting everything to stay the same doesn't work, and we reflected a lot on all of the years we had our little kids running around in their wings and fantasies, how we raised our families and ourselves in that loving and safe atmosphere. There really is no anger out there, or rather, all emotions are worked out in the woods. The evolution of our thinking as a collective group has most certainly created an alternative that we recognize. We bring our best selves out there, open and trusting, trying our best to love and hope. It fails when our damage and our pains get in the way and make us selfish, forgetting the proportions and perspectives we must keep in mind. No one is in less pain than I am, permanently, meaning, all lives carry unimaginable pain, distress, and worry, and we're all fairly equal in that. You don't know mine and I don't know yours and we just have to remember to be kind and caring and allow that while we might be one in a million, there are a million just like us. We have to continue to work to find joy and we can't give up. We have to say the hard things and then lighten our hearts. We have to stop complaining so much too.

The rain was a challenge that just proved we can handle it. I did a good job with tarps with lots of help and also relearned a few things about tarps and lots of help. We might have been a little hard on the neighbors but were also very helpful and it seemed like we got along great with the new people on one side and the village and everyone around. It seemed to go very well in the most rainy year ever, so now we know that not everything has to be a disaster. Happy people came. Mud was minimized. We got to leave on Monday.

Meanwhile things I care very much about, the Market, the Farmers, the City and how it works, have been ignored but other people paid attention while I was too busy. It's better for me to take a little distance from it and let the process flow sometimes, let other people's opinions rise to the top without my influence, which can be limiting sometimes. I want to try to step back from some of my volunteering, just some small steps for now, but mostly to relax and have more time to be creative and to pursue some of my other goals. I guess I'm happy to have too much to do, on some levels. Some of it is overwhelming and it's better if I don't look too closely at it. Most of it just has its time of importance and then has to wait on the shelf for that time to cycle around again. I took two tubs of Jell-O out there and didn't wear a single piece (granted, misty rain is not the best for those things) and I didn't even wear any earrings or frou-frou. I barely changed clothes to be honest, except the inner layers. All I did was work, with one notable sauna. (Pro tip: the best time to seriously sauna is between noon and three.)

I had the goal to see every craft booth so I sped around the various loops and tried to view it all, discovering much of interest but spending no time really exploring it. I bought three little things. I saw no shows unless they came to me, which a couple did! Thanks to the Radar Angels and Steel Wool and thanks to the never-ending promenade of people around and around the loops. I think that is what I miss the most, the lively mix of people passing by my front door on their way to dinner or a shower or whatever they were going to. I love the feel of that evening stroll that is what people do in small towns all over the world: you go out with your loved ones and walk around seeing everyone in town. That is where the relationships are begun, when you see each other acting naturally, being real, sharing life, in your context. That is really wonderful and why I like to camp out there. Sleeping isn't easy, but meals are everywhere, and having a cozy home to retreat to with a place to make a cup of coffee and sit and talk with family is the gold of the Fair for me. I guess that is the next challenge, to contemplate how to protect and sustain that and not lose it.

I'm a worker, and though I talk about wanting to retire, it really just means changing my work to fit my aging. I'm not going to be one to sit around. I'm an Elder, but I don't want to give up what I do for Fair. It's a common dilemma for crafters. It's going to be a big topic in our Craft Committee discussions this year. How to tighten up and loosen up at the same time is the challenge for Fair. We have to fill our individual needs in the context of our collective ones. It takes a lot of thought and a lot of working together with all kinds of people, with the goal of bringing all of us along. I am very hopeful, in fact, convinced, that we can do it. So many of us have made this part of our lives, one of the strongest parts. We're in it, and going to stay in it.

So even with all the shit that comes with that, it's what we're made of. Maybe part of my role is to get to work on that 50th anniversary interpretation of the peach. It won't be long. I'm going to want to be there, and I might as well admit I'm going to work my right livelihood magic on it at the same time. Because Fair, and Market, are me and I am them. There's no separating that now, and there probably never was.

Crafts are my Culture

Edit: This is a post I wrote a couple of weeks ago and couldn't finish for some reason. Maybe it was just too soon to bring up cultural appropriation again, even in a new light. 

My Saturday Market season was launched a week late, and after so many decades, I know what to expect: completely surprising details in a fairly routine pattern. Much had changed over the winter, so there were missing craftspeople, and new ones, recognizable customers and ones from out of town, laughs and hugs and bad jokes and the constant drumbeat interspersed with refrains from the buskers on the corners and wherever they thought they had a space.

It looked like there might be big changes at the Courthouse Plaza as the sellers over there were finally hearing that there is a difference between commerce and free speech, but it looks like nothing will indeed change. Apparently those doing commerce were going to be required to pay for the appropriate permits and insurance requirements that Saturday Market has been paying for for almost five decades, but the prospect of litigation or violence reared up and the pressure went down. It's hard to be against free speech. No one wants to be in that position, certainly not Saturday Market or the City of Eugene.

It's odd to observe them and be taken back to my own early days when I was making anything I could think of that might sell, so that I could live from my own craft. I don't think I was looking for something for nothing but in those days you could sell at Saturday Market for $3.50 a day, so those zero days weren't quite so expensive. But using that structure to grow within was certainly beneficial for me and I don't see how resistance to it makes that much sense, even with our new fee structure and the process it takes to get a really great space. It does make it hard if you aren't handcrafting what you want to sell. We aren't a flea market.

Now that the discussion of cultural appropriation is deepening and people are looking more carefully at how words and images matter and what needs protecting, I'm bringing up the discussion of handcrafting again. (Not that I've dropped it.) If you've been listening to the larger culture you now know that everything from commercial beer to fast-food tacos to kayaking is being described as a craft or hand-crafted. If a person's hands were involved, that designation is being applied. It obscures what I consider the artisanal practices that have been carried from the most ancient times, of some person taking a raw material and making it into something useful and beautiful from the work of their own imagination and skillful application of simple hand tools and techniques.

This definition doesn't include stuffing a taco or patting a burger into a round shape. Those are cooking skills and that's not what handcrafting is. There can be artisanal foods, of course, but unless one person is putting their own creativity into it, those foods aren't qualified for this distinction. For instance, Dana mixes up his cake with his own recipe, takes it out of the oven at the right time and frosts it. I'm sure he makes it look easy and can make a lot of them but he still does it himself, with his hands and because he wants to. So that is a hand-crafted food. If he bought the cake and just frosted it, the significant contribution of his frosting would have to outweigh the commercial material of the cake. Food isn't the best example of this, but it makes the point that we draw some lines that divide the products we sell at Saturday Market from the products for sale everywhere else.

It's easier to see with a product like a wool hat, for instance. The artist selects the wool, creates the pattern of color and design, knits the hat, blocks it, finishes it, displays it and sells it. She stands there and can easily say "I made this," without a shred of ambiguity. Most of our crafts are like this, dishes made from raw clay, paintings made from a blank canvas, prints made from a silkscreen process with the artist holding the squeegee. Not that there aren't some gray areas.

T-shirts and other screenprinted items have always presented a dilemma because they are commonly commercially made items. Saturday Market has dealt with this by calling the t-shirt a blank canvas, and requiring that any commercially made items be simple and generic so that the artistic contribution has outweighed the item. You couldn't sell a white t-shirt without an image, but if you applied the image with a craft technique, you could. You could also dye it, but you couldn't send it out to someone else to be dyed, even in a color you chose, because the requirement is that you have your hands and heart involved right on the piece you are selling. The Maker and the Seller are the same person. It's a narrow definition and many people currently selling things under the mantle of hand-crafted are in zones that are even more gray than the t-shirt one. I do my own screenprinting, but some artists don't, and some send their art to a business that provides them with a digitally printed image made with a printing machine (a fancy copier/computer) that is a step removed from their watercolor painting or original image. This has been allowed, but it pushes over the line and those in the world of Standards and jurying have worked over these lines with questions that are hard to answer. Now that we have 3-D imaging, where does the line get drawn with reproductions? It's a constant discussion in meetings. It's very hard to dial things back.

At Saturday Market, because we sell every week and have meetings every month, a lot of the fine lines get redrawn and adjusted over time, but we can still have an artist who cuts a coin with a little saw selling next to one who cuts a similar image with a computer-controlled laser. It's not ideal, and the technologies keep coming. Invariably the use of technology provides the opportunity to have multiple images or objects made at a lower cost per piece, with less artist labor involved, and thus less of a hand-crafted component. I know over time I stopped being accepted into craft fairs with my screenprinted shirts. They began to require a handcrafted garment as well as a hand-done application technique. We've been slow to make this change at the Saturday Market, because we are also a business incubator and we like to give a person a chance to get started as an artist. If they need someone to print for them until they can get set up to be a screenprinter as well as an artist, we've allowed that, letting them know that we hope that they will work up to being their own screenprinter as well. Sometimes they do, but other times they go in the direction of getting their images reproduced in even less hand-crafted ways, such as the digital prints. We haven't really been able to satisfactorily address the use of technologies within the limits of our non-juried, open entry marketplace. We'll never run out of subjects to discuss. Sometimes things tighten up, and sometimes they loosen.

We considered requiring those people selling digitally reproduced paintings (called giclee prints) to stretch their own prints on the wooden frames, but it was viewed as harsh to ask painters to be woodworkers, even though everyone is not completely comfortable with products that you can just order, unbox and sell. Your artistic contribution stopped at the original painting. We recognized that you had to make a living, and selling the prints and cards of your images allowed you to have a reasonably priced product. But that border needs constant patrolling.

So to cut to the chase, I challenge OCF people to start thinking carefully about what is sold at our Fair/festival. I doubt many festival-goers even remember that we are a top-quality hand-crafted Art Fair. Erosion of this ethic has come from lots of directions and in lots of subtle ways. Many, many things are sold during the Fair and the weeks around it that are not by any definition hand-crafted. Does this matter? Do we care, as a community, that the hand-crafting artisans are becoming a sideline, a misunderstood and rolled-over part of our landscape? Many of us have done this our whole lives, and founded and nurtured the Market and the Fair to protect a place where we could thrive, out of the commercial mainstream. Do factory-made products threaten us? I say they do. Someone asked me yesterday where they could get one of those cool pleated-fabric sets of wings they saw at Fair. I had to say I am pretty sure those are a commercial product you can find online, not a product of a Fair crafter.I hope I'm wrong about that.

I hope I'm wrong that the craft world is being eroded. I think it does still matter to people that things are handmade by artists you can talk to. I think the success of our two events is testimony to that. But I also think that the culture we participate in is in danger of being rolled over by fast food commercials and co-opting. So just listen carefully when you hear the word craft, and do your part to keep it meaning something different. Craft beer should find a new name. I suppose it is a compliment, right?