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THE TOXIC ECONOMY By Patrick Clark ©1999.
When I first met Linsi Deyo she was busy crafting a pile of funny round cushions she called "zafus". Cut pieces of fabric were all over the living room, the iron and sewing machine were going full speed ahead, and she could only talk to me between sews as she tried to concentrate on her cottage industry. I was impressed. Here was a woman who found a trade which employed her in a rural Appalachian community where most of the rest of us were driving to a distant town for our bread and butter. I was equally fascinated that anyone would purchase these odd-shaped pillows--let alone sit on them. She invited me to try one. Reluctant at first, I soon realized these cushions were great. They provided a way to maintain a natural posture with so little effort and so little furniture. Little did I know, some day this woman would be my wife and business partner and I would be a meditation cushion salesman.
Really we were a good match because we shared a similar quest. Linsi and I both subscribed to the same credo--that the current economic climate which exploits people and the environment to produce profit for the stockholders was in need of reform. I always wanted to create a "right livelihood"--a business which would support my rural lifestyle, provide a meaningful service to the community, and be pollution free. I wanted to be a part of the "Green Business" movement which promoted ethical and ecological business policies and practices in the workplace and beyond. The idea is that if businesses use energy-efficient and recycled products and equipment to produce the same, and employ high ethical standards, it will create a more just and sustainable world. The leader of the movement is an organization called Co-op America which currently lists 2,000 business members in its National Green Pages and publishes a quarterly magazine.
The green business movement was almost 2600 years old--founded by Shakyamuni Buddha--before Co-op America began fifteen years ago. Right Livelihood was a part of his "Eight-fold Path" to enlightenment. The eightfold path is a formula for relieving suffering in one's life and the world. This formula included cultivating awareness of each action to work towards the highest good. Now, under a different name, a lot of people were interested in right livelihood. A new market of green consumers had evolved, and I believed I had found the bridge between Buddhism and Capitalism.
I married Linsi in 1994 and began working in her business, Carolina Morning Designs. What are these things, and what are they used for? That was my job to explain. There wasn't much to them. Just a fabric cover stuffed with kapok fiber and later buckwheat hulls. They were just funny little hand-made cushions that cost a lot more than any pillow I'd ever seen and were too hard and fat for sleeping. Supposedly they were used in Asian Buddhist monasteries (though to this day I haven't been able to dig up a word of historical documentation) and now they were getting known in the U.S. Buddhism was beginning to catch on. Carolina Morning Designs evolved with the phenomenal growth of Buddhism in America.
Neither Linsi nor I had the knowledge nor the resources to effectively run a business or tap into the Buddhist market. We were well meaning, idealistic, social and environmental revolutionaries who wanted to merge our ideals with our livelihood. Because of the incredible environmental degradation and human suffering caused by modern industry, we had each developed a repulsion to money and business. My college major was environmental education and Linsi's was philosophy. Our love for nature brought us to the rural western North Carolina mountains, and kept us from living in the city where we could find jobs. We were not naturally organized and our only business education was the school of hard knocks. Our money issues were the monster in the closet, stuffed in there with all the unsorted papers, unpaid bills, and a life not planned or thought out.Yet on some level we were fascinated at this monster (money or business) which we didn't understand. Perhaps on some level we felt that if we could master it, it would somehow become friendly. It might even reveal some kind of mystery which could open our minds and create a dramatic shift in consciousness.
We kept pushing our money issues aside until the electric man knocked on our door with a "collect or disconnect" order. That's when it hit us how money links even the good acts of the world. Without it, even a green business cannot survive. Our $7,000 per year income did not work. The manufacturing business had gotten too big for two people to handle alone, but wasn't big enough to support the employees it needed. The only answer was to sell more cushions.
But this whole idea seemed like capitalism, which I thought was the opposite of Buddhism. Wasn't this suppose to be a noble right livelihood project? Wasn't Buddhism, and our business, a sanctuary from the market economy where one is bombarded with tacky and pressuring messages to "buy this" or "eat here". How could we promote our cushions without encouraging materialism and competition with other companies who were trying to do good as well?
Many weeks the phone barely rang. It was like trying to sail in a sea with no wind. Our friends felt sorry for us and offered much advice such as, "Why don't you sell them at football games? They would be great for those hard stadium seats." Everywhere we went, we were dreaming up ways to sell more cushions. We considered bumper stickers. They could say, "Carolina Morning Designs: your one stop for enlightenment.'" But how do you make a big noise with something that doesn't make any noise at all?
We spent many years looking at this as we worked in the business and sat on our cushions during meditation day in and day out. This was our koan. (A koan is a Zen riddle which reveals an aspect of enlightenment when uncovered). How do you operate in the market economy with non-violence and still make a living? How do you make a living without supporting a system of destructive resource use and dysfunctional social practices?
Instead of having worked toward a career, we had spent years learning how to live a sustainable lifestyle, grow vegetables, bicycle for transportation, cultivate inner awareness, recycle paper, plastic and glass, write to our congress people, boycott WalMart and participate in local environmental groups. We didn't know how to do all this and make a viable living. Can they go together, or does one need to sacrifice the sustainable part while at work in order to support the sustainable part while at home?
Over the next few years a lot of the answers to these questions were revealed. In fact, we were coming to see that Carolina Morning Designs was our path to understanding ourselves and the world. The paradox of being a green consumer is that it costs more--because you are paying the true environmental and social costs--so you need to make more money. (How can we afford solar panels and get off the grid if we are struggling to buy organic carrots?) And to be truly green you need to make money in a way which fosters sustainability. How many of us can say our work, or the company we work for, does this? Or the companies where we invest our money? Or the products we purchase? Basically, the quest for survival is still as primal to us today as it was to our stone-age ancestors. Immediate personal survival often overrides concern for long-range, planetary survival.
We learned that even a green business uses many of the same procedures and principles as a standard business. Just because we do good doesn't mean we will do well. We decided that if we didn't learn (ugh!) the ways of managing business and money that we so repulsed and avoided, we might as well go find jobs. Money crunching, marketing and advertising, systems design and analysis--all the things which make Wall Street and the stock market tick--these were the things we had to learn.
The E-Myth: Why Most Small Businesses Fail and What to Do About Yours was a book which turned our perspective and our business around. The term "E-Myth" refers to what most people believe an entrepreneur is: someone who knows a trade and has a great idea to start marketing their creation or service. Author Michael Gerber calls this an "Entrepreneurial seizure". What is overlooked, according to Gerber, is that running a business takes management skills. It is not enough to just know a skill or design a product. At first a business can handle the few orders needed to run it. But at a certain point, the business gets too big for one or two people to manage. Then there is no organization or system set up to facilitate the kind of quantity of sales needed to survive in our highly ordered and competitive market place. This is the reason most businesses fail within the first five years of operation. We were a case in point. Cushions and materials and papers and equipment were all over our house, porch and barn. Our bills were often paid late with stiff fees, and taxes seldom filed on time. We could never keep up, much less increase our orders. We didn't have a profit and loss statement, so there was no way to analyze anything about our business and make informed decisions. We could not even take a small vacation.
We read the book in 1997 then signed up for an eighteen month correspondence course in the E-Myth Academy.They could hardly believe we had made it twelve years. Concepts like "Target Market," "Strategic Objective," and "Positioning" were new to us. "Positioning," for example, is intentionally setting one's product and business apart from the rest, so it sticks out. Depending on the product and the market, you either make yourself look tough or soft, fun or cool, smart or funny, technologically advanced or earth friendly, loud or quiet. Through the course we built a stronger foundation to prepare for methodological growth. We developed a logo and put a prominent label on each cushion. We improved our inventory, started taking credit cards, increased our ad presence, got on the fledgling Inter net, and promised delivery within two weeks instead of six to eight weeks as before.
We are still in this clean up phase of our business. We've put in hundreds of hours quantifying, measuring, researching, projecting, imagining, fixing, and systematizing everything from A to Z. We began documenting our time worked, created a marketing plan and "strategic objective"--a vision of how CMD would look in its ultimate manifestation, systems diagrams, and position contracts. All this was extra--on top of working in the business to run the business. When we realized we netted around $12,000 in 1997, we wondered if it was all worth it. So many years of our lives were invested in building a dream that wasn't sustaining us, or fun even. It had become mostly a matter of survival by that time.
For two people to live off of $12,000 while working full time, they must be very creative. In the fall of 1997 we relocated to a different community where some friends allowed us to build a tiny, movable house on their land. We rented a cheap building nearby to run the business. Almost every weekend for a year was spent setting up our lives in this new environment, building our insulated, passive solar trail shelter on the edge of the Pisquah National Forest, which is our house today. The first winter was cold, we had only plastic stapled over the window openings. For months we were constantly exhausted and burnt out, barely able to go on and face the new day. We were living in the old world of do-it-yourself subsistence (make-it-or-do-without) and the modern world of high pressured business (analyze, quantify and compete), with no space or rest in between or at either end. Why would we work so hard for so little? What was in it for us? We had worked ourselves into a predicament and we were working to get ourselves out. We couldn't go over it or around it, we had to go through it. Call it karma or circumstance, the fact is by that time there were no other viable options. In trying to create a better world, we had created a very stressful and unstable life--sort of the opposite of our ideal.
For hard times, there is no better place to turn than the very Buddhist teachings which we were promoting through our cushions. We had to take a close look at the The Buddha's Four Noble Truths, that suffering (Dukka) exists, that suffering has a cause (the attachment to pleasure of the aversion to pain), that liberation (happiness, peace) is possible, and that the path to liberation is the Eight-Fold Path. It took great strength to accept where we were at and not be bitter, blame ourselves, or indulge in self-pity. Somehow we managed to stay together in our 10 foot by 10 foot shelter, and work side by side to pull Carolina Morning Designs out of the tangled mess it had become.
Carolina Morning Designs has been our vehicle toward discovering our place in the universe. Through it, we have created an environment which has many of the qualities we would like to see in the world. It is a place which encourages open communication, compassion, positive change, recycling, orderliness, a healthy outlook, and contemplative living. This is not a "rags-to-riches" story, the kind that fascinates so many people. Perhaps this story and the lessons we learned are more powerful and helpful than riches. It is a story about looking at money and the lack of money, and learning to not identify with or cling to either. It is about two people's quest for right livelihood and their coming to terms with the way things are, and that the way things are is impermanent. It is a story about developing present moment awareness and practicing it in the experimental arena of work.
Today Carolina Morning Designs employees nine people part time besides Linsi and I. The hard work of systematizing, organizing and strategizing is paying off, as we are reaping the benefits through increase sales and efficiency. The casual work environment fosters fun and camaraderie among employees and allows all of us to maintain a rural lifestyle in a place where most residents commute. The simple act of living where we work has allowed us to plant gardens and create community. We are in a constant state of dynamic evolution and learning, changing, rearranging, organizing and restructuring as we dance with the fluctuations of the market place and integrate each insight that becomes uncovered.
Patrick Clark and Carolina Morning Designs can be reached at POB 509, Micaville, NC 28755 or www.zafu.net, or 828-675-0490.
Co-op America's can be reached at 1-800-58-GREEN: 1612 K. Street NW, #600, Washington, DC 20006 or www.coopamerica.org