Chronicle of Compost Retold

RantWoman has been reading Ashley W's Welcome Prayer and the comments accompanying it. Sometimes RantWoman ALMOST gets there. To be honest, finding something to welcome at least works a lot better for RantWoman than endless contemporaneous incantations in other blogs of the word "surrender." RantWoman is trying to welcome and just be present with anger, confusion, hurt, impatience with both her own and Dear Friend's different extended and contentious dialogues with the Divine.

Thanks to a visitation to an old conversation over at the Association of Bad Friends regarding a Friend from NY, (RantWoman HATES FB because it is so hard to post links and click back and forth between FB and other parts of the E-verse.) RantWoman has further come to realize she also needs to welcome some messy complicated thoughts about how Dear Friend and others in our community deal with each other. This has to do with prophetic voices and mystical traditions, inconvenient interactions with accepted realities and a whole raft of the usual contradictions of life in modern consumer society.

Sometimes RantWoman can say Poor Dear Friend. RantWoman has indications he thought his interventions regarding RantWoman's nomination would be a simple walk in the park and chat about Faith and Practice. Well, RantWoman is giving him the benefit of numerous doubts. Our first Clearness Committee meeting tried to get at reasons, some longstanding this was not the case. We need to try again.

Meanwhile, both RantWoman and Dear Friend in different degrees wish some of the public parts of the situation would just GO AWAY. Alas, it is clear at least to RantWoman that, while some of the problem unquestionably needs community help, there is total lack of clarity about numerous points:

What is community and what is matters between Dear Friend and RantWoman? As with the matter of exactly where a process problem arose, RantWoman suspects she and Dear Friend would not agree about where to draw that line. RantWoman has become very very clear that there are numbers of issues where Dear Friend's voice is important to community discernment, but RantWoman really, really wants to formulate problems in terms that are not personalized specifically about Dear Friend.


Is the working out of things between Dear Friend and RantWoman a stop to other parts of service on said committee? RantWoman would say no, absolutely categorically not for two main reasons. First much of the conflict between RantWoman and Dear Friend is unique to our situations. Second, the fact that RantWoman really, really cannot minister to Dear Friend alone is neither here nor there as far as RantWoman's ability to minister to others. RantWoman is still having a serious dialogue with God about what she is supposed to do with respect to Dear Friend and the rest of our community: some circumstances keep pointing at the possibility that there is something RantWoman specifically is to do. RantWoman so wishes the words recalcitrant and impervious to ordinary sensible suggestions did not leap so quickly to her mind when she thinks of Dear Friend, but perhaps RantWoman is simply again supposed to exercise her well-used gifts of phlegmatic accompanyment.

It seems even MORE conversations and discernment are inevitable. Ugh! Sigh! Moan.

Tonight RantWoman had such a conversation. Thinking about this conversation is what crystallized RantWoman's thoughts above about shiftng the conversation to problems / concerns of the community rather than RantWoman and Dear Friend.

Last night RantWoman had another such conversation with a certain topical committee responsible for helping set tone about what gets seasoned in Business Meeting. RantWoman thinks she did okay about making clear some concerns though she wishes she had been more nuanced about a couple points. For instance, RantWoman gets so exasperated sometimes with Dear Friend that when he says "water is wet" RantWoman wants independent confirmation. RantWoman wishes she had phrased that point in terms of ongoing process integrity not specific to Dear Friend even though there unquestionably are Dear Friend-specific concerns. RantWoman supposes she needs to think more carefully about general points that are bothering her and how others can help monitor / uphold the process / ... This would be PART of a process of RantWoman testing whether her specific concerns have resonance in things she observes of others and then focusing about what is important specifically to RantWoman as far as vision loss issues and what she needs from her community in that regard. More on that separately.

The second point RantWoman brought up as a trial balloon. RantWoman and Dear Friend either need to decide to stay out of each other's work lives or to have better dialogue. Some of Dear Friend's comments about RantWoman's work situation have been, um, unhelpful. On the other hand, RantWoman realized while massaging some of the data from Dear Friend about his personal situation that Dear Friend should seek released Friend status--which would have to be seasoned by the very committee at issue regardless of what happens to RantWoman's nomination. Can you say recipe for further interestingness?

RantWoman has identified another similar issue deriving from our Year of Discernment and from RantWoman's quest for topical documents. Dear Friend will already be working this topic for another reason; RantWoman thinks she and Dear Friend between us have plenty of history about our Meeting to add some generalizing extensions to what the topical committee already did, extensions that coincidentally would also respond to what the YoD steering committee seemed to RantWoman to be asking for. So....


RantWoman supposes one person who is in a position to know of the reindeer droppings email will be stunned that RantWoman opted not to mention it last night. RantWoman thinks there is plenty else to talk about and dwelling on that will be unhelpful. Plus in seasoning a response, all RantWoman is coming up with is sarcastic and less than Quakerly. We may have to start from the truth behind the sarcasm, but... RantWoman admits to being peeved that one Friend thinks acting on the situation awaits the outcome of the clearness process. RantWoman refuses to speak for Dear Friend and in fact would most like to have conversations about some community matters where Dear Friend is one voice among our community RantWoman thinks the clearness process needs to address personal matters and that is going to take how long it takes.

RantWoman herself is seasoning whether the clearness process is too much and is in the way of other effective participation. So far, RantWoman thinks the personal matters are likely to take awhile. On the other hand having the nomination tied up in that will just make some of the personal matters worse and will not necessarily speak either to RantWoman's spiritual growth or to community needs!


So recounting from the beginning:

--Just getting Dear Friend's walk in the park scheduled proved a pain. One reason is that RantWoman has ruthlessly been in "Make your own Job" mode and that just takes time. RantWoman considers herself VERY lucky that her circumstances align so she can meet many basic needs through these efforts and thus does not have to endure all the travails Dear Friend endures. To make time crunch matters worse, Dear Friend is one of the worst offenders on RantWoman's list of friends who are LATE to EVERYTHING on the bus.


--RantWoman half suspects that one of her ministries in the walk in the park phase of the matter was just making Dear Friend wait his turn. RantWoman again notes that she failed to detect any crisis larger than average and the above phrasing MAY be reading more into Dear Friend's point of view than is appropriate.


--RantWoman has noted the possibility that Dear Friend is particularly prone to having his need to elder others crystallize in connection with nominations processes. RantWoman is simply filing this point for context. RantWoman hopes Dear Friend might be open to new revelations about this tendency, but perhaps it is others in the community who need newly to discover the point and figure out ways to interact with this.


--Communications between RantWoman and DearFriend have been heavily impacted by issues to do with computers, when email gets read, documents that send RantWoman's screen reader off to foreign lands, RantWOman's need for documents she can read and Dear Friend's severe time constraints about interacting with the online universe, other people's preference for paper or email.... At one point, RantWoman and others now clearly admit we also both should have picked up the phone yet again.

--RantWoman is TRYING to welcome the caring and presence behind Dear Friend's ill-received interventions. It is one thing if RantWoman asks Dear Friend for something or other. It is quite another if Dear Friend dumps it in RantWoman's lap unsolicited. RantWoman KNOWS that Quaker history is full of Friends dumping concerns in others' laps, but RantWoman most assuredly demurs from a peculiar personal attack as pedagogy aspect of Dear Friend's interventions.


--Dear Friend plowed into some of the reasons RantWoman finds him not necessarily the easiest person to have dialogues with. RantWoman throughout this whole situation has been accumulating some really harsh "I feel" items in draft mode in both blog and email about a sense of feeling hemmed in without space for different views or room for different conversational dynamics. RantWoman has experienced this in pretty categorical and controlling terms even though around the edges when RantWoman manages to dialogue sometimes interesting exchanges occur.


--Dear Friend plowed into some of RantWoman's insecurities about vision loss. Some of these most assuredly are not Dear Friend's problem. Nor, for personal reasons of his own is he the best resource for RantWoman to rely on for some kinds of help. However, Dear Friend's general tendency to plow first and reflect... unquestionably do not help in this context. Sigh.



--Dear Friend keeps talking about his leading which he has seasoned with no one that RantWoman can tell and keeps plowing into RantWoman's old father stuff and wondering why RantWoman is emitting howls of pain.



Now, as RantWoman has been slowly speaking about the matter to others, RantWoman herself is rapidly getting sick of several topics even though merely speaking about the matter is also making RantWoman more resolute that the problem involves both matters RantWoman needs to try again about talking to Dear Friend of and things RantWoman would like others in her community to figure out and get its collective act together about.


For the record, RantWoman has been reading some but not with fanatical discipline from items available online about Eldering. RantWoman notes that this is highly topical to the Pacific NW Quaker Women's Theology conference. This would in various terms also be highly topical to RantWoman's compost thread, a zone where RantWoman is spending FAR too much time and emotional energy. RantWoman does not want to argue eldering wit Dear Friend alone, but RantWoman would like conversations where Dear Friend is one part of the community work. RantWoman wants to help people find the tools they are looking for.

Merry New Year renewal, revival, revisitation...