01.22.09 ~ “Pioneering”
January 22, 2009
It’s funny that this word came up today. I have been thinking about this word a lot in the last few days. It’s connected to several things that have been on my mind.
First and foremost I thought about the word Pioneer as I watched Barack Obama take the oath the other day to become America’s first black President. Although I am happy and proud about that I am even more overjoyed by the fact that such an amazingly inspired MAN is taking the office – not just an amazingly inspired BLACK man. Thank God!! Finally someone in office who I can truly be proud of! And hopeful about! But I thought of all the countless, nameless and faceless people it took to pave the way for such an extraordinary thing to take place. True Pioneers!
And that brings me to the next subject that relates to pioneering. I have recently been trying to let go of the hurt, the anger and the resentment that I has been surfacing in regards to not being included in any of the books and stories about the current craft revolution. I was trying to figure out not only why I felt so hurt by the being “left out” but also how to move beyond those feelings and let them go.
Then last weekend before I taught my first sewing class in two years, I was reading a chapter in “Handmade Nation”. Just as the girls arrived I finished a paragraph in which one of my former students from San Francisco was being interviewed at the Maker’s Faire in San Francisco. She was teaching her own sewing workshop at the fair, where more than 45,000 people reported came through! Wow! But instead of feeling hurt that it wasn’t me they were writing about in this great book about the rise of craft, I felt happy and proud. I realized that I was very successful doing what I had set out to do – teach and inspire people to be crafty in hopes that they would do something wonderful with it be it in their own lives or in the lives of many others. I got to thinking about all the people who went on from my classes to do so many wonderful things, start so many wonderful businesses, open up sewing and knitting studios of their own, and of course get written about in fabulous books (not to mention writing some of their own)! What more could a true teacher want?
In that moment I felt like I let everything go – all of the hurt, the sadness, the feeling of being betrayed etc. I felt so proud of what I had done. I don’t necessarily feel like a trail blazer but more like a cleared the path for hundreds of people to come to reive the craft movement and bring it to the forefront of our culture, to write books about it and make movies and teach even more people just how important art and craft is. So I may be one of those nameless, faceless people, and not the one mentioned in the books and movies, but I know in my heart that, just like those people that cleared the path that made it possible for America to elect Obama, I played (and continue to play) and important role in the history of “making”.
