This blog entry is long, long overdue. I had wanted to say some things about the Tesuque Flea Market in Santa Fe as a way of closing that experience. I was there for about seven years. It's where I got my feet wet as a merchant and I came into myself as an artist. I got windburned and brow beaten, too. But I'm thankful for it all. Mainly I wanted to write a note about how I met so many amazing people through being there. Some will be life long friends. Some are customers that I will never forget, even if we never ever see each other again. The amount of synchronicity I had around this meeting up of customers was sometimes profound. Very often in these past few years I've been floundering - sometimes very obviously so! - and would just sit there and pray and someone or some group of people would walk in and say the most amazingly uplifting things and our hearts would open and especially through the phase when I was getting divorced but not openly talking about it there were tears as others shared their stories with me. Often their stories were so much more difficult than mine and I felt the privilege of our sharing the space of grieving together for a few moments, via the art that I made. Sometimes people showed up as miracles. Once when I was not sure how I was going to make it through my personal dilemmas I was in line for a taco or something and I thought - man EVERYBODY gets tips - except for me! I mean EVERYBODY has a tip jar out and you're just supposed to give them something, something extra. I said to myself, I want tips! And some time after that, no kidding, a woman with mascara running all down her face from crying after reading my work, bought a whole bunch of things and then TIPPED me a hundred dollars. No kidding. I hadn't even put my tip jar out there. She left and I started crying too. I was weeping behind my silk taffeta curtains. Because more than the money she gave me some very strong words about stepping up in the world and finding my place. I will never forget that. And I was having another complete downer moment a couple years later and was praying in my head, What am I doing here, god help me, I don't think I can go on, and this family stepped in and they were reading my work and gathered all around me and said some amazingly encouraging things. It felt like a spiritual intervention! They were urging me to keep going, to continue. I'm always in this head space of how poetry is hard and I'm grateful but sometimes really pissed off that poetry and art are what I'm called to, in a world that can be so unyielding at times. Perhaps you have to be one, an artist without a choice about being an artist, to know what I mean. Or perhaps you only have to want to be one. Sometimes it sucks. I say over and over again how I'm about where the poetry meets the practical but it is just not easy. It's incredible and it's gratifying but it's not easy.
Now that I've seemingly left Santa Fe (I mean nothing is fixed and you never know what life will bring next, but for the moment I find myself in Los Angeles) from comments friends have been making to me, I didn't realize how I'd hardly been happy in Santa Fe, was always waiting for the next steps to reveal themselves. But perhaps I didn't move on because I was afraid to close the circle. In July, towards the very end of my time at the flea market in Santa Fe I intersected with a woman from Chicago who later wrote about her experience of meeting me there. I had meant to post this on my blog then and we had even talked about it. But I got caught up in moving. Here is a slightly shortened version of what she wrote - which upon re-reading it I can see was all about important closures in her life. Which is right timing for me, as I'm living and speaking to important closures in my own life. I will greatly miss the customer-friends and the friend-friends I got to see repeatedly at the flea market. Please come and visit me in LA if you live here or are passing through here.
Let's continue to reach for what matters most and for our deepest dreams to unfold. May we each be supported in miraculous ways in this unfolding. Because already we are. With love and respect.
Day 3 Santa Fe
Very little in the flea market enticed me to touch, let alone pick up to consider for purchase… until the very last stall next to the gate I entered.
The stall stood more similar to a tent at an art fair, than the other open-air flea market booths. Three-dimensional framed and shadow-box collages hung on one wall, with a chest high table beneath holding more collages along with a display of small gift enclosures and a few tiny pillows with yoga related graphics printed on them. The artist, Lisa Chun, now living in New Mexico, by way of California and DC, I learned, sat behind a lowertable in the back of the booth. A curtain protected her back from the beating sun. Next to her, a spinner displayed greeting cards and envelopes in clear sleeves, a further derivation of the collages.
Each collage consisted of a photo layered with vintage and found papers and objects from nature to create some level of abstraction affixed on a canvas or paper base by photo corners. Scraps from a printed page, other pictures comprised the rest, along with a poem or saying written by Lisa. She charged somewhere around a fifty dollars for the collages on canvas, twenty for the prints, and five dollars for the greeting cards. Though watching my money carefully this trip, I loved the original collages so much, I considered purchasing a print. When I realized I could have four smaller versions my mind was made up. The cards still held the impact even at nearly twenty-five percent of twenty percent of the cost.
A vacation in New Mexico was planned to nurture my increasing interest in writing. Last year I attended the Taos Writers Conference conducted through the University of New Mexico. Then, I didn’t consider myself a writer; but with regular attendance at writing groups in Chicago, feed back from readers and writers, I returned this year to hone my skills. Though I hoped to meet up with people I met the previous year, those I spent my time with then, chose not to return for one reason or another. As the trip approached, my excitement multiplied with the prospect of distancing myself from the work that drains me and time to think about what’s next for me. Truth be told, I’m aware and embarrassed that my typical topic of conversation with nearly any friend or family member revolves around needing to change my life, mainly my work life. The docent at the Georgia O’Keefe museum described me when she explained how to view the films. “It doesn’t matter when you enter; just stay till it starts over and gets to the part where you came in.” I’ve been repeating myself, and I am damned lucky my friends haven’t left where they came in. In a nutshell, so everyone is in the loop, and I don’t have to ever repeat myself, I can’t afford not to work and my soul can’t afford to continue working in the vapid environment I now participate. The vacation is in part to give me time to think and dream and shift into a new direction.
Six years ago, I closed a business that lasted seventeen years. While the last couple years were challenging and enervating, they never were boring and I remained in view of my dream until the end. In the years since, I held two other jobs, each clearly temporary from the start – they were placeholders until I got my bearings. I’ve held my current job for nearly four years. I work for an organization I transitioned from to start my business. Going back there, even after close to two decades, felt like home. And, I recognize now, that I have returned to feelings I felt when it was time to leave last time. This time however, I don’t have a vision -- a dream.
Which brings me to my time in Albuquerque and Santa Fe; I spent time each day writing then doing whatever I pleased. I visited with a class mate from last summer the first afternoon, explored downtown Santa Fe, drank a terrific tequila margarita at a roof top cantina, toured the Georgia O’Keefe museum and traversed the Tesuque Pueblo Flea Market where I happened upon Lisa Chun and her collages.
I stood at the high table along the open wall, pawing through the prints, putting a couple aside. Lisa asked me where I was from and I told her Chicago. She said she had a friend who studied at the Art Institute and she visited, though not really liking the contrast of homeless in the neighborhoods and minks downtown. She must have seen that I couldn’t decide between the prints and mentioned the cost difference with the greeting cards. I moved over to the table whereshe was sitting to look through them.
I reread the poetry, some more than once. Usually, I don’t really get other people’s verses and pass it by. The first one I pulled out said in ransom-note-cutouts, “This must be the way dreams are built: First a glimmer, something shaken down from the stars, something made of thelight and air and hope. Then comes all the days of quiet activity in support of it.”
I shivered. Lisa’s collage was the theme of my vacation. I’d come to New Mexico, craving time alone, away from the work that drains me, for quiet activity, to build a dream. I pictured the card on my desk or perhaps taped to my bathroom mirror reminding me to continue the quiet activity in support of my dreams.
The wording already hooked me; I took time to dissect the graphics. Mostly in sepia tones, the left side with a scrap of handwriting – with only the word love readable, copper verdigris smudges and shadows blending to the right into a side walk along side a row of parked cars. “The shadows,” Lisa said with a bit of a question in her voice to focus my attention, appeared at first as a long dark old-fashioned wood clothes pins, “are my friend from Chicago and me taking the photo. We were in an area called Andersonville.”
My mouth went dry. Andersonville, it’s the neighborhood where I lived with my husband and baby when I originally built my last dream, my last big dream -- my company. In the ensuing years, the marriage ended, the baby grew up and the business closed. The dream evaporated.
Today, I closed the circle, the last booth at the Tesuque Pueblo Flea Market, where I received a glimmer … something shaken down from the stars, something made of light and air and hope. And, all the days of quiet activity in support of it.
Hudson McCann
