[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

Craft Fair

It was a perfect day for the July craft fair: sunny and not very 
warm, with a breeze that kept the mosquitos at bay. (Being near a 
very large river helps.) I had friends with booths in the fair, and 
so I wandered over in the early afternoon, buying a hot dog for lunch 
and meandering around the park in front of our handsome town hall, 
observing and visiting and (with one exception) not shopping. My 
house already has more than enough dustable stuff in it; I don't need more.

The fair was a mildly uneasy mixture of stuff: attractive bags and 
purses, truly hideous burned-wood signs with not-so-clever sayings, 
one poetical watercolourist (very new to the game, and nervous), 
average hand-knits, lots of homemade jewelry, preserves, hand-made 
soaps, you name it. There were some truly lovely photography booths 
(hi, Bob!) and some finely wrought wood carvings. We're in a 
transitional period, my adopted town, one foot still in Church Bazaar 
Land, the other foot fumbling towards fine arts and true artisanal 
work, and the fair showed the wobble between two worlds, as the town 
itself wobbles between past and future.

But still, with the exception of a couple of (well, forgive me!) 
cheaters who were merely re-selling stuff they'd obviously bought, 
pretty much everything in the twenty-odd booths was made by some sort 
of creative process. True, tastes vary; stuff that was selling quite 
nicely (those burned-wood signs) isn't to my taste, as the poetical 
watercolours weren't to the taste of those who fancied the signs. But 
there was much creativity there present, some of it misplaced, much of it not.

It's a human drive, this creativity business. Probably most of it 
fails on a purely esthetic scale. Hunting through our local flea 
market later in the afternoon, I came across so many 
not-so-successful hand-painted pieces, lovingly mounted photographs, 
and other projects, the recipients of so much time and love and (at 
least sometimes) skill, that fetch up in -- well, small-town flea 
markets. It's like considering the huge proportion of turtle eggs 
that do not result in adult breeding turtles.

But we have to put everything in perspective. There is a range in 
human creativity from the child's stick-figure picture, lovingly 
mounted on the fridge with magnets or scotch tape, to the very, very 
large and very, very excellent Rembrandt I once saw, donkey's years 
ago, in an exhibition of the Queen's pictures. There is everything 
from the massive beauty of Bach's Mass in B Minor to the astonishing 
elegance of "Shenandoah," and it all has its own imperfect truthfulness.

All the best beauty we can muster -- the finest endeavours we can 
achieve -- are nothing to God's perfection in Creation. Are nothing, 
and are everything. Our creativity, whether we know it or not, is the 
spirit's response to the Creation in which we live and move and have our being.

I am exceptionally lucky in living in a landscape that to me -- bred 
up in landscapes of lush green and still silver and wintry 
charcoal-and-white -- embodies the Creator in particular ways. 
Others, brought up in a landscape that makes me deeply uneasy, one of 
rocks and sands and starkness, find the Creator there in ways that I 
respect but cannot seem to share. Still others find a home in 
concrete canyons and the twist of superhighways. And that's all 
right, for this earth has room for all sorts, if we can let go of the 
need to be solely right in what matters.

But we respond to Creation and the Creator by creating, as best we 
can, in ways that we find important and meaningful. That, more than 
any esthetic, was what the fair was about. To me at least.

After a while, I went home (right across the footbridge over the 
river) and packed two of my own new pieces up, a fused-glass dish and 
a stained-glass piece of my own design, and took them back to the 
fair. I showed them to a few people and got words of approbation that 
will help me move forward. For praise is what Creation and creations 
need, and what the Creator desires of us.



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A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in 
no other way. -- Mark Twain