Ears and shared stories

RantWoman is SO touched by her spiritual sharing group. First, they bounded out of bed and drove across town to meet at 8 am on a Saturday!

Those gathered got off to a surprising start with questions about confidentiality and limits for comments that involve harm to children, harm to oneself or harm of others. The conversation clarified that several of us really wanted / needed, among other things, space to talk about our own experiences with substance-abusing family members. Of course one POINT of such shared journeys and sometimes the exhaustion involved is that substance abuse frequently is a form of self-harm that very little can be done about until the person affected is ready to respond and in the meantime there is exhaustion and the need to manage limits.



The conversation then stretched toward 18-year-olds, youth, life experience, expectations and trepidations. RantWoman is still figuring out what more detail to add and in the meantime is embracing the opportunity to hold one Friend in the Light about working in a somewhat new though previously difficult way.



RantWoman here needs to admit the beginning of the Meeting just made her smile for another reason, the youthfulness of a Friend who spoke of staying up till 1 am doing something on Youtube and his youngest child delight at (finally) being the one to plan a family trip. RantWoman cannot explain exactly why this Friend getting hooked by a passion on Youtube makes her smile so deeply, except that it feels like more 18-year-olds in the room, all youth and passion and enthusiasm, and not having vanished or stopped being transformed even at an age considerably older than RantWoman!



The gift of others' words and inquiries:

--One Friend used the word "aggravations" in relation to his spiritual struggles. RantWoman HOPES but has no visual basis for being sure that this Friend accepts RantWoman's heartfelt assurances that her laughter is because the term is so perfect, not because RantWoman in any way wants to laugh at this particular Friend.



--RantWoman, what is it you want us to get from a narrative with several strands?

Uhhhhh, that WAS a pretty tangled narrative, and RantWoman really mainly wanted to make the point that a problem is freaking her out and having Friends hold the situation in their thoughts would be lovely. RantWoman had already detected that probably a problem that has been vexing her for months did not even register on the minds of several assembled. RantWoman thinks that is both a blessing in terms of not having to talk about it and a curse in terms of points she has already detected about people's ability and inclination to participate in some strands of community life. The Friend who asked RantWoman to clarify showed later signs of getting one of RantWoman's key points, and RantWoman is going to have to hold the rest of the question to see how it plays over time.


--A friend sharing of hearing loss and how he thinks this impedes both his hearing of actual words and sometimes his grasp of what is meant by the words. RantWoman was just this week looking at a Youtube video of ways interpretation from one language to another can go awry and one exchange involved a similar problem.



RantWoman finds these comments SO helpful. RantWoman has been digesting comments from several directions about her communications. RantWoman is SO glad to get this feedback not freighted by really, really intractable baggage from one direction. RantWoman for reasons of educational background, fascination with math and science, and temperament spends a lot of time analyzing gender dynamics in conversations. RantWoman also detected others being open about difficulty processing information in general, not phrased in a particularly personalized way. All of these points are just such gifts!



Today thoughts of substance abuse and boundaries found RantWoman wandering in a surprising direction: one of RantWoman's piano teachers, an old friend of her father's was an alcoholic. He was also a very talented musician and the RantFather frequently hired him as church organist. RantWoman uses the word frequently on purpose. Piano Teacher was an alcoholic. Sometimes he was sober, on the wagon, and sometimes not. When things got too bad, the RantFather would fire him; when he got clean again, the RantFather would hire him again. RantWoman is meditating about whether this model might wind up being applicable for other immediate problems in her life, but first she must write separately of being a bad student of conflict resolution.