The value of a wooden spoon

The economy of wares: the value of a wooden spoon

When I can, I sell wooden spoons and bowls direct, person to person. I want people to be able to handle things, see some of the process, chat, build relationships — and burn less gas…. If all exchange happened that way, in time, perhaps, the value of things would change from dollars and numbers to life and love. In the meantime, however, most folks want a price. How do I determine a number that’s both right and fair?

Scott and Helen Nearing famously reduced their economy to a simple equation: 4 hours a day for “bread labor” (which included selling produce from their farm, among other cash activities), 4 hours a day for “cultural labor” and the rest for cooking, eating, loving, sleeping, cleaning, etc. Similarly, I can give about half of every day to earning money. I have made a practice of keeping my living expenses low, and know how much cash I need to make in a year, so I divide for my hourly rate. My magic number is (still!) somewhere between $25 and $60 per hour, but prices can be arbitrary, based on where I’m selling, who’s buying, what I think I can get, how much I care about the piece, and how long I have to make the sale. With luck, it all works out. (So far, so good….)

The value (as opposed to price) of wares oscillates, however, not between two poles so much as between two wholly different scales of value. The first scale is Village Value; it rules, because it follows the laws of nature. Then there’s the currently dominant consumer economic scale which, because it works against nature, will either destroy it — or die. 

So I try (as best I can, w/in the confines of “the economy”) to live by village values: no clock, no timecard, everything you do takes work and it all feeds you, whether with food or beauty. Yes, prices are based on how much money I need and how much time I have to earn it, but I do not separate work and pleasure. Instead, I have to balance the needs of family, homestead, garden, and community. In the village, every one of these has equal importance; it’s not scale with a top and a bottom, but a circle. 

My family and I had pretty good success applying village principles at home: we supported the family and raised kids well and happily below the US poverty line. We had more time and freedom than most folks. My partner tended the garden and hens, raised meat birds, made the best bread, etc. I built and maintained our home and the rest of the infrastructure, helped in the garden, and earned the cash. The state provided decent health insurance at no cost to poor folk. (If we went over the income limit, the insurance line item either exceeded our food expenses, or we paid a lot for minimal coverage.) We did what we could to minimize the environmental damage we incurred, tho it was no where near “sustainable.” (The only cultures that were sustainable (IMO) didn’t burn fossil fuels, didn’t separate art and science, etc. ad nauseam…). 

In the marketplace, I sell both books and wooden wares, both of which I think of as beautiful, utilitarian objects that anyone should be able to afford. But while I work quite quickly, a one-off, hand-made bowl necessarily costs more than a mass-produced book. Most wares that I make represent about an hour’s work, give or take a half hour. If I were a tradesman, I could charge an hour minimum and $150 dollar spoon would be normal. However, most people have metal or plastic spoons they get for free or close to it.

What if people valued spoons as much as phones? How many people spend $1,000 on a phone that they’ll replace in a year or two, as well as $100 or more a month in user fees? $100 for a wooden spoon or bowl that could last a lifetime would be cheap by comparison.

But if I put a hundred dollar price tag on a spoon or a bowl, it enters a different category — especially if I depend on environmentally costly internet and next-day delivery systems to do the work of getting wares into peoples’ actual hands. Then it becomes ART, a mere commodity and/or investment. (As a piece of “usable art,” however (which will never get used — too expensive), it becomes a fetish or a fad.) In a few years, it might be worth more. Or it might be worth nothing. Kinda like the stock market.

There is, I hope, an alternative:

Perhaps a wooden spoon can serve as an object lesson, a story, an example, a reminder of the village we’ve lost — and a guidepost on the way home. But in order to do that, I can’t just carve the spoon and put it up for sale: I have to have a conversation, build a relationship, develop an understanding with the person on the other end of the transaction. We have to share a common story, a whole circle of gifts, not just a transaction of spoon or bowl for money.
 
I have a a pen pal in Toronto who I met thru common interests in ovens, fire, food, and community. We both recognize the loss of village value, and we’re both engaged in the work of re-building. She’s bought some spoons from me, and I’ve always been happy to sell them to her cheap, because she uses them, gives them away so others can enjoy using them — and because she and her husband have gifted me many valuable stories. Tho we’ve never met in person, I think we have a shared understanding of beauty. Because the exchange feeds us (maybe me more than her) in ways that our own villages can’t (yet) — and because I trust that we are similarly engaged in the challenge of trying to repay unpayable debts — I can accept responsibility for the oil drilled, spilled, and burnt, and the resulting debt to nature incurred by the long-distance exchange (still, there is guilt and grief there…).

When she got the last shipment of spoons, however, she wrote and said she felt she’d underpaid. I was working on this essay, and sent her a draft, and a note: 

“I gave you what I’m thinking of as the “village price” — because I count you as a member of my village, an elder of the tribe, someone whose friendship and stories I value more than money. [But] if you want a simplistic reduction of the whole pricing thing, what I think would be a “fair” (ish) price (gift exchange) would be the cash equivalent of about 4 hours of your time (or your annual budget?) —give or take an hour.”

Her first response was a much larger amount of cash from paypal, which instantly raised in me all kinds of anxiety about fairness and fetishism. Then she wrote a note of her own: 

“Your story exactly solved my problem. I sent you a random amount of money just now. Another gift — not equivalent to anything, but giving me the chance to express my joy at what you sent…” and to “exclaim about something good.”

A transaction begins with a price and ends when you exchange goods for money, but a relationship begins, and continues — with gifts. There remains (in me, at least), a good kind of anxiety about how to maintain the feelings of joy, fairness, and friendship. Such exchanges take time: more than most folks have when they go shopping. And the current economic paradigm sure doesn’t support it. But I hope the story might help to clarify my pricing challenge, which is not just “making a living” but returning the gifts that life and planet give to us all…

To better understand, I think we have to consider the un-countable: a Japanese netsuke carver named Masatoshi followed his father into the trade. “When you work,” his father told him, “you must not think, ‘How much time should I spend on this?’ or ‘What price should I ask for that?’ If you harbor such thoughts, you will cheapen your work.”

The mind takes its shape from the thoughts we entertain. Thoughts of money make the mind into a cash register. One of the beauties of good work is how it empties the mind. That’s what makes room for the beauty. Yamaoku Tesshu, a 19th century Samurai and calligrapher, said “look into things near at hand and examine your heart…. We must look after each other without regard to our own welfare, kill selfish desires, bravely face all enemies, and keep a stainless mind….”

Beauty favors a stainless mind. A mind possessed by money makes only profits. And lest you think I’m fixed on a “Japanese way,” my father’s father, a doctor, told his son, “never work for money.” So, because my father wanted to learn about the world, write and make things, he learned to fit his needs to a small income and had an extraordinary career that started in the white house press corps, and ended in a family business making beautiful household pottery. In between, he wrote novels, traveled, did some union and community organizing and prison activism, as well as sculpting — and, always, wrote and told stories. My artist mother (tho divorced from my father) lived by similar values, wrote 13 books, raised two sons, skipped college, earned a Masters degree, painted, made beautiful things (some of which ended up in fancy collections), worked as a therapist, and traveled the world.
 
Profit-driven consumer culture tends to ignore the complexity of living by values that can’t be calculated. So “the economy” puts a capital “A” on the label “Art,” and assigns it fringe status. Then it fetishizes a small number of big names to whip up a market frenzy and fantastic prices — sometimes when the artist is still alive, but often only after death (death, of course, reduces the threat of non-monetary values even while it raises prices).
 
But what shapes the mind shapes the world. The power of art to shape minds and worlds all began with the old definition of the word, which originally meant to “fit together,” and just indicated a basic, universal instinct. Farmers, teachers, parents, carpenters, dancers, not to mention all our other neighbors on the planent —ants, birds, bears, etc. — all had to be capable of work, had to have the ability to fit things together — had to have an art! Indeed, the principle of evolution simply recognitizes that better fit makes better process and better product. We evolve towards beauty.

Such beauty works as a language that we share in common with all creation. Beauty speaks the world into existence: you, me and everything else. We all sing back: sun, sky, rain, flowers, grass, trees, critters, rocks and earth — a chorus of beauty. All value comes out of that chorus. And that’s what I really want to talk about. It’s what I want to give to people who buy a spoon or a bowl. Anyone, rich or poor, should be able to afford beauty.

All value begins (and ends) in the dirt. “All flesh is grass.” If you look up that phrase, Wikipedia will send you to the Old Testament of the Christian faith, but in truth, it’s merely a common observation: all life feeds life: grass feeds cattle, cattle feed us, we feed the grass (of course, the circle flows smoother without interruptions named McDonald or Wendy). We give back to life — to beauty — when our bodies die and become food for all the beasts and bugs that make the dirt (if, that is, we don’t isolate our flesh in a sealed coffin…).
 
You can’t buy or sell value, you can only exchange it. A good trade is an exchange of beauty for beauty. When Europeans arrived in what is now New York, the locals were using wampum, made from shell, to exchange not only goods, but stories and meaning. You didn’t need money to live because you were born with free access to land, food, shelter, and clothing — as well as an education that provided the skills, knowledge, and courage to thrive even when the landscape turned harsh. The indigenous world revolved around gifts. Food was a gift. Land and material were gifts. And the human labor that converted shells into wampum, or wood into bowls and spoons was also a gift. Value wasn’t something that you added to “raw material.” Value, like life, was given. And everything was alive — trees, critters, earth, air, water, rock… But the newcomers saw the wampum as “just money.” Their skills and technology allowed them to manufacture it quickly, in large quantities. The resulting inflation was not only bad for business, it also further devalued the cultural, story-telling and relationship-building qualities of the medium. When you convert a medium into money, you reduce the message to profit. Indigenous culture and the village gift exchange lost power, lost currency, lost meaning.

So what’s the value of a wooden spoon? I asked this question once in a class, and heard a marvelous story about one man’s family’s “favorite spoon,” which he’d bought cheap from an import plaza. The tag said “made in Haiti*.” He said (roughly) that “it’s our favorite: we’ve had it forever, it was cheap, handmade, and we use it for everything.”

An offhand comment? Perhaps, but it means a lot: “our favorite” says (to me) “our most valuable spoon.” Where does such value come from? Does it come from a famous name artist? A sky-high price? Exceptional rarity? NO! It comes from the opposites of those things: it’s cheap and common — just another spoon in an import store, but still…unique, hand-made, by a real person working to make a living — someone probably more like us than different. Second, it’s useful for everything; it doesn’t just hang on the wall. And everyone likes it. It was a completely spontaneous comment about what constitutes value, which is not dollars, but life, love, joy, and connection.

These values underly all value; without them — without spoons to eat with, and things to eat; without flowers and bees to pollinate them; without worms to feed the roots of the grass that feeds the cow, that feeds us —  without such small, daily beauty — we would live lives of terrible poverty. Or we would not live at all…

We understand this only by participating in it — by growing and eating food, building our homes, and carving our spoons and bowls — for ourselves, and for others — because one can’t participate alone — because beauty, skill, and knowledge must all be passed on, from eye to hand, from hand to heart, to anothers’ hand — from parent to child and from teacher to student. And while we may all eat with our own individual, private spoons, we all ultimately take our nourishment from the same source…

Culture grows from such roots. A spoon begins with a tree, and the tree takes us back into a garden that we must not only share, but cultivate and fertilize — with our own bodies and lives.

Here’s another story: 

An American businessman who owns a hat factory goes on vacation to a foreign country. At a peasant market he finds a guy selling beautiful hand-made hats. He offers to buy the entire stock. The peasant says, “but then I won’t have any hats for the people who need them, and I’ll have to work more.” The businessman says, “but you’ll have enough money to hire people to make hats for you. I’ll buy all you can make, and you’ll be rich. Then you won’t have to work.” The peasant smiles and says, “but I make enough selling a few hats to my neighbors. I work a little bit, and the rest of the time I spend with my family and my friends, at home, in the garden, and in the village. I don’t think I want to be rich.”

* Haiti: the only place where black African slaves managed to overthrow their “masters” and establish a free democracy…a spoon holds a world of stories.