Author: Betsy

“To Not Speak, Is to Fail the Possibility of Humanity.”

| Betsy

Sometimes when I go to the library I feel like I’m dowsing for water. I wander and roam and pick up this book and that book, until something feels right and truly resonates. My most recent library trip led me to James Orbinski’s An Imperfect Offering: Humanitarian Action in the 21st Century. Orbinski worked for Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) for many years, and then later founded Digitas International, an organization that helps people with HIV/AIDS in areas where it runs rampant have access to affordable medication.

I finished the book late last night, and was touched by the way Orbinski included stories of the people he met along the way in places like Rwanda, Zaire and Sudan. It’s definitely worth a look if you’re interested in the politics of humanitarianism and action. At times it’s heartbreaking, empowering and inspiring, but there was one point where I realized why I had been “led” to this book in the library that day. It’s the basic tenet of craftivism on page 290, and includes a quote by Jose Antonio Bastos, who worked with MSF to aid the Rwandan refugees in South Kivu, Zaire escaping genocide in 1994:

“Contrary to what some poets say, all is not fair in love and war,” Jose said. “Even if it is impossible to help the refugees, we must keep trying, and find the truth of what is happening, and we must speak. Sometimes speaking is the only action that is possible. To not speak, is to fail the possibility of humanity. No, all is not fair in love and war,” he repeated. “If we are to remember or even discover what love really is, what peace really is, if there is to be real hope for any of us, we need to be reminded of this.”

When we make crafts that speak to our frustrations, hurts, anger, we are continuing the conversation that our world is not a just one, but one full of hope nonetheless. Your hands give you the freedom to speak even when you don’t think your voice will carry. Just remember that they are important, necessary and truthful as we may live in a sometimes unfair world, but a world where our actions help others speak up and gather the courage to fight as well. Your voice will carry, whether it comes from your mouth or your hands, as it all comes from the heart.

Handmade Nation PDX Premiere!

| Betsy

So excited to be going to Portland in just a few days for the Handmade Nation Portland premiere! Yay!

Also excited to be on the CraftPerspectives panel* moderated by Museum of Contemporary Craft curator Namita WIggers.at 2pm on Saturday with old friends and new: Susan Beal (West Coast Crafty, Susanstars), Jill Bliss (Blissen), Kate Bingaman-Burt (Obsessive Consumption), Garth Johnson (Extreme Craft) and Faythe Levine (Handmade Nation)!

After spending the past three weeks either traveling or visiting people in hospitals, I’m looking forward to having some travel time for FUN and not for unexpected familial health stuff! Awesome!

*I agreed to do this a little late in the game, so I’m not listed on the site, but I’ll be there! I’m on there now! Yay!

Hurry Up and Wait.

| Betsy

Being in a hospital is kind of like being in a really really depressing casino. You’re left in this timeless space where night and day mean little. Somewhere in my wake-up at 3.30am sleepiness the other morning, I decided to take photos of two of the three waiting rooms we spent time in.

I keep on writing little bits and pieces over the past week and then losing track of my thoughts. All I can think about is healthy thoughts and make sure no machines are beeping weird and staying awake while keeping them company, even when I’m not here at the hospital. A true one-track mind.

Just keep busy. Keep moving. Keep pushing forward. Go, go, go, make sure everyone’s eaten, slept, taken care of themselves. It boils life down to just the essentials, and makes the rawness and fragility of life clearer than you ever thought imaginable. And, of course, a few months from now we’ll get complacent until something else happens, then life will go under a microscope again where every thing’s cherished and sacred, as it should normally be.

Soon we shift from pinpointed to easygoing and become predictable. Is it possible, however, to have that point illuminated and in the forefront at all times? Or would the sheer weight of the quickness and realness of it all make us crumble? If we truly cherished our loved ones and life long-term and not just in these moments of chaotic and palpable clarity, who could we be?

I’m betting that at first it would seem daunting to truly and honestly as Emile Zola wrote, “live out loud,” would seem out-of-control and visceral in the stark reality of our lives, that they’re passing, moving, marching on. But I also think that if we dare ourselves to hold firm and stick with it, it would eventually show us the strength we thought we didn’t have, love so deep it seems boundless and the wide open joy we deserve. It would make us who we would truly like to be, but never quite fully seem to embrace and unveil to the world. It would help us remember that due to the passage of time and intricacies of life, we owe it to our loved ones to show them the best, the brightest and the boldest we can be.

The lamp painting was the first pass on a piece that will be in The Scrap Exchange’s show, Domestic Spaces: Art and Artifacts for the Home, which will be up March 20 through April 11.

Have found some lovely new links lately discovering all sorts of people who are merging creativity and politics! For starters:

Art Threat
Eyeteeth
Just Seeds
Groundswell Collective
Irregular Rhythm Asylum
Tel Aviv Graffiti and Street Art
And check out this link to some amazing craftivist works, link thanks to Toronto Craft Alert!

*And on the subject of waiting, Fugazi’s “Waiting Room” won’t stop playing in my head. Thankfully, it’s one of my favorite songs.

And in Knitting for Good book news, there was a lovely post on Whipup about it yesterday, which you can read here!

And if you’re curious about what’s in the book, look no further than The Unique Sheep blog as Laura has posts about the first five chapters! Chapter 1! Chapter 2! Chapter 3! Chapter 4! Chapter 5! Wow!! Thanks so much Laura!!

Foreign. (Film, Immigration and Old Familiars.)

| Betsy

In 1985, I got 3rd place in a school art contest with the theme “Safety.” It was a painting of a policeman stopping traffic, and to this day, I think it only won 3rd place because it marginally had something to do with safety and wasn’t off-topic. Last Sunday, twenty-four years later, I picked up a paint brush again. Although it’s not for a contest and has little to do with safety, I’m pretty happy with the preliminary results.

We watched The Visitor as I tried to retain the bounce of the brush on the canvas and stay in the lines I had drawn- while also paying attention. Although I’m not sure if it was the painting or the film, somewhere along the line I started tearing up. I’m not really sure which was the culprit, and think perhaps it was a little bit of both. The film is about the unlikely friendship that arises from an equally unlikely introduction and deals with issues of belonging, home, identity and immigration.

As I’ve done work in the past with refugees, my heart went out to the people everywhere who are in those back rooms in detention centers or airports or live in fear of being denied asylum or what have you. And since I hadn’t painted for so many years, I also felt that rush of release you get when you tackle something new and unfamiliar, that unbridled freedom of seeing where your hands may take you is always an adventure. Although canvas, paints and brushes are benevolent things, there is still a sense of escaping your safety zone as you push toward new skills.

So as Richard Jenkins’ character learned to play the drums in “The Visitor,” I picked up a paintbrush (a little easier than playing the djembe). While his lesson was tied up in a messy storyline fraught with modern problems and frustrations, mine was unfolding quietly with a dog curled up against my side. The result? A pleasant and kind reminder in the liberation and joy of letting yourself go and learning something new.

Other lovely things of late:
*Savta Connection (a group urban knitting in Tel Aviv)
*Discovering the activist anthropology department at UT-Austin
*Interview with Syrian musician Kinan Azmeh (who speaks of those back rooms)
*Art Yarn’s Call to Action for handmade knitted or crocheted strips for an exhibit at Manchester Craft and Design

And as for me, I’m being kept busy:
*Preparing for a group show at The Scrap Exchange in Durham, Domestic Spaces (March 20-April 11)
*Excited about my first trip to Portland for the Handmade Nation West Coast premiere, April 2-6th! I will be on a panel called Craft Perspectives on Saturday, April 4th, which I’ll be posting more about later. For now, you can see more details <a href=”http://www.museumofcontemporarycraft.org/hmn/programs.html”>here</a>!

Parable.

| Betsy

So this post isn’t so craft-related. It’s people related. Since I see craft as one of the ways to connect with people and like exploring the ways people connect, it fit together in my head. (If you disagree, there are some lovely older posts about craft here. Go forth and explore!) Lately I’ve had some extra time on my hands as I’ve been doing a lot of driving alone in the car. It’s led me to rethink the paths I’ve taken in my life. It’s amazing how family emergencies can lead to these sorts of thoughts.

Somewhere in the middle of the Georgia swamps, I thought about growing up and not understanding why my body would revolt and freeze up sometimes. And it was weird, and I had no idea what was happening. Then later came depression, which is a bit like having a wet wool blanket over you at all times. It’s cumbersome, thick and somewhat stinky, but despite your best efforts, it’s still there. The worst part of it was how I related to people. There’s nothing strange about why I became a sociologist and a writer, as all those years I felt like an observer to everyone else’s life. I was in the room, at the table, in the kiss, holding hands, on the soccer field, I was everywhere. But at the same time, I often wasn’t there at all.

When you feel apart from everyone and watch your loved ones grow old together and your friends get married and children are born, all the happy joys of life, it’s as if you’re a stenographer not someone close. When it happens for over a decade you begin to wonder what the silver lining is. There was a pulse you were missing, a wall you had up, a barrier holding firm.

So you move and you travel and you search and search and search for a way through. You want to feel the touch, get the joke and move forward, too. And you worry about other people’s problems so you don’t have to feel your own. You get to see some really cool things and have lots of adventures! Even more importantly, you begin to forget that there’s a distance. Then you cool down a bit and stay in one place for a few years and begin to remember the distance and all the annoyance it’s caused.

Then one day, as you’re rushing down the highway trying to get to someone you care about, and navigating labyrinth hospital halls, and trying to find the right room among all the doors surrounding you, you realize. It’s not in the faces of the nurses or the other patients in the room. It’s on the face of the one you came to see, smiling to see you. And suddenly, you realize the wall isn’t there and you’re in the moment instead of just taking notes. And the moment, even though it’s in a hospital and scary in its reality, has a pulse and a beat…and not just the ones emanating from the machines and monitors either.

As you might have already guessed, the wall that used to be there was already long gone, you just needed to trust in the future enough to take a step forward instead of standing still. It wasn’t magic or luck or good timing, it was making the choice to put one foot squarely in front of the other and not being afraid to look ahead. Holding hands and hugging close never felt so good.

And for the compassion, patience and empathy all of this has brought me? Well, the learning curve wasn’t much fun and it could have lasted a much shorter time, but I don’t wish it happened any other way. It’s what makes the little things more special, the days more exciting and the world multi-colored instead of like blancmange. Sometimes people wonder why and how I light up at the littlest of things, but now that they’re here and I’m here with them, these small details and extras are nothing but tiny joys. So, the long way round, I found the silver lining, and it’s pretty freakin’ sweet.