Hot fresh compost

RantWoman SO hopes after the February Meeting for Business that the Compost melodrama does not have to come up ANYMORE for awhile. This would GREATLY please RantWoman.



RantWoman in fact feels she has plenty to do in the life of her Meeting and more broadly in her life as a Friend. RantWoman would not mind in the least if Dear Friend would actually ask her opinion about something or other, but RantWoman expects that will happen or not and in any case not on any timeline of RantWoman's. RantWoman is quite on strike about some concerns of Dear Friend's which RantWoman definitely thinks worthy of seasoning but which need to be seasoned by more than just RantWoman and Dear Friend.



RantWoman has formed and further refined some opinions about ferment and shifting of many threads in the life of Meeting and people therein; RantWoman thinks some of this may eventually bubble into her blog but has no intention of hurrying. RantWoman is more certain than ever both of a number of basic leadings as a Friend and of needing to deepen her own spiritual life, but RantWoman is also on strike about trying to solve everything at once let alone in Business Meeting!



RantWoman continues to subject many things, friendship with Dear Friend, his and numerous others' pronouncements about many topics, basic community awareness of many traditional Quaker practices to ruthless tests and checks. In short, service on a specific committee or no, RantWoman is clear about much to do--besides having to be present with all that is still unfolding.

RantWoman also takes note of some questions of ministry and other matters and has decided she darn well needs a support committee to help about her blog. RantWoman has dutifully written an email about this topic and is now trying to walk this request through the process a certain committee requests. RantWoman is giving herself the option of being peeved that her request is going to be handled on Quaker time, at least another month out because of the press for said committee of other matters, a RantWoman commitment in the coming month, and general grinding of process wheels. RantWoman also recognizes that in order even to season her request, Friends are going to need education about many points of blogosphere life that RantWoman sort of takes for granted. RantWoman will write separately about why she plans in the meantime to continue filling the interwebs with her journal-like efforts to deal with her inner volcano / compost heap / choose your favorite metaphor for inner light in serious need of tending.


RantWoman felt her heart sink over the minutes early in the week and has written of that elsewhere. February Business Meeting also featured another item from a specific committee which caught RantWoman (and all the more so probably Dear Friend) off guard. RantWoman would NOT have minded if that one had been to a threshing session first instead of Business Meeting, but no one asked RantWoman or the one ask got quite muddled.



The ask RantWoman speaks of: Dear Friend does not include the text of emails he is replying to AND changes subject lines so RantWoman frequently has to guess what he is referring to. RantWoman awhile ago emailed several Friends in topical positions a request for a threshing session. Dear Friend wrote RantWoman an email which RantWoman took to be about the threshing session, putting RantWoman's request for a threshing session in a negative light. RantWoman wrote back trying to deal with the negative light by joking about something flip to do with our cats' different behavior issues.



RantWoman certainly could have picked up the phone to someone and tried harder. RantWoman also regrets omitting something she thinks she came to after the cats email about a time when she was very new to Friends and found a threshing session to be the coolest experience for ways to discuss emotional or unclear matters under care of spirit involving views or experiences of many people without expectations of any set outcome or decision. RantWoman finds herself wondering whether she had unrealistic thoughts about the number and variety of threads she might have wanted to touch in such a meeting. Anyway, no threshing session happened and it seems unlikely for the time being now.



RantWoman decided all that is needed for the time being is a request to have materials due to be handed out in Business Meeting in advance by email. Well, not quite all: RantWoman wrote an email to a limited number of Friends in topical positions with the thoughts above about Business Meeting and a threshing session, as well as a couple personal experience comments and an observation: RantWoman is no great scholar of early Friends' spiritual journeys, but if half the Quaker blogosphere writes of getting dragged kicking and screaming into spiritual transformations, RantWoman gets to concede the concept might be topical. RantWoman could complain yet still of many matters, but RantWoman's complaint queue is already quite full.



RantWoman initially thought to make another phone call, to articulate to yet another Friend a point about amateurs and pastoral care and the spiritual dimensions of sharing life experience that does not belong in raw form in a blog--or, apparently, in public chatter in Business Meeting; for now Rantwoman included some sketching of the point in her last email and will listen for ways to have actual conversations.

Meanwhile, some thoughts about things that mean a lot:


--RantWoman really appreciates our Adult Religious Education program. It has been well worth RantWoman's time to get her sorry self on the bus three weeks in a row, both for the content and also the range of new voices and for the vigorous sense of both fellowship and inquiry that prevails there.

February as featured George Fox as presented by Friend recovering from Stroke, muddled with references to isometric exercises as an aid to worship (?!?), with a speaker's wish that George Fox had just made little asterisks and notes about his views about oaths, and with some historical howlers that was making a much better historically versed Friend roll her eyes next to RantWoman. RantWoman did get that 17th century London was a dire place and that George Fox was kind of histrionic and nervous. Who needs nuances? Sometimes one just runs with the nuggets one gets.



Too much George Fox cut a little into RantWoman's pre-Business Meeting worship, but a message during worship about faith bearing one forward and our clerk's reading from Sandra Cronk spoke to RantWoman's condition--besides the part about wanting to be able to read Quakers her own darn self, another topic RantWoman is seasoning next steps about.




RantWoman has been taking stock:


--Adult supervision over email with Dear Friend seems not so bad and RantWoman has come to appreciate the person offering such supervision. RantWoman is conscious of the number of messages she sends and is unclear whether they are helpful but RantWoman is clear to send the hints and helps she sends, as well as bits of humor. Dear Friend uses email an hour a day at the library and has many things he needs to tend to. RantWoman pointedly does NOT razz him because he can go to any branch of the library; RantWoman can go to exactly TWO branches that have the tools she needs to use the computer if away from her beloved albatross of a laptop and we are both SUPPOSED to count our blessings.


--RantWoman appreciates different voices who have read some of RantWoman's email temper tantrums and offered insightful interactions.


--RantWoman appreciates a "don't take it personally" aspect of another Friend's list of gripes with Dear Friend, significant overlap with RantWoman except a couple specific to eash one's lives but even those have proceed with caution elements.


--RantWoman has to offer appreciation for a couple voices saying in different ways "Earth to RantWoman..." If RantWoman is going to have trouble maintaining contact with Planet Earth, she guesses it is a VERY good idea to have trusted Friends who will remind her of this when she cannot detect the problem herself.


--RantWoman offers appreciation for a couple voices who have just been witness and said things like "holding you in the Light." This was RantWoman's request when one of the voices was trying to figure out why Dear Friend had included her in the conversation. Thinking about this person, a small local remembrance time she held for her father and some psychic themes still getting tuned, RantWoman realizes there is another reason to be glad of her presence. But at the time, RantWoman said, well. you don't even have to read the emails; just hold us in the Light when you see it in the inbox


--Appreciation for some messages from others that are parallel to some of Dear Friend's concerns but MUCH easier to hear not freighted by other baggage.

RantWoman suspects, that hard as actually talking still seems, the right conversations with the right people would be a gift. RantWoman is glad to have some George Fox language to use when speaking of other's traits.



RantWoman is pretty clear there is an aspect of needing to elbow way to space for own stuff in more conversations. Whine. Moan. RantWoman would so like mindreaders instead.


RantWoman admits that midlife efforts to clean up psychic detritus SHOULD at least be easier to deal with than all the various circumstances that created the psychic detritus in the first place. Well, maybe.



RantWoman still thinks Dear Friend was seriously out of line about numbers of points, but RantWoman cannot even finish either her emails or blog posts detailing exact offenses and RantWoman is more clear about focusing on things she can actually do something about.

--RantWoman is VERY grateful to have access to official via the mental health system professional counseling. RantWoman's counseling professional asks decent cogent questions which RantWoman gets to talk of mostly not anywhere near Meeting. Counseling professional laughed for 10 minutes when RantWoman said she thinks she keeps counselor in business because every once in awhile she hits a string of issues that no amount of antidepressants by themselves would resolve. (This wisecrack is RantWoman penance for previous employment-related familiarity with trends and tendencies about anti-depressants.)

Counselor recently gave RantWoman a metaphorical pat on head for doing her work and not flaking out of (too many) appointments. RantWoman has just been on hold at the crisis clinic for someone else and therefore RantWoman is not willing to risk crises of her own. But regular worship also HELPS.

Finally, RantWoman has been turning over another reason to TRY to extend grace about the situation. Besides miscommunications, another Friend's concerns about someone's housing issues caused RantWoman to remember that at the time of the onset of the compost melodrama, Dear Friend was also moving and unhappily so. Even now, when considering Dear Friend's challenges in the realm of paid work, RantWoman HAS to count her blessings about many things even as she also also pokes and prods at some Very Big Questions about Friends are called to do, called to be in the times of today's crises.

RantWoman will tell the Friend concerned about the housing matter of the resources she knows and the approaches she recommends. Maybe RantWoman will NOT go into all the reasons she sometimes feels quite hard-nosed. RantWoman had to throw her very own RantBrother out of her household two different times because of drugs and unaddressed mental health issues. RantWoman had to help RantMom get TWO years worth of restraining orders to throw the RantBrother out of RantMom's house. Then there was a spell of emails from someone else unsure whether the RantBrother was living in his shrubbery. How, HOW can someone not know anyone has been living in their shrubbery, in January, in MT? RantWoman has seen this shrubbery.



During this time, winter in MT, RantWoman had conversations with the RantBrother about the gift of a pair of longjohns. Years later, the RantBrother is housed and stably employed. He still makes odd purchasing choices and consumes frightening quantities of alcohol and RantWoman even allows him to be a snob: if he drinks high-end booze at least he can afford less of that than the cheap kind. RantWoman sometimes allows herself to grieve that RantBrother is not really available for many conversations, but he is enough of a horticulture guru, MAYBe he would at least appreciate some Compost associations.