Then there is the matter of Russian literature in particular where all the characters get called by multiple names and pseudonyms and variants of same. RantWoman also seems to live in an interesting mental muddle where she attends to different aspects of many events in small bites over time with Spirit overseeing gaps of unpredictable length between. Plus RantWoman has read a lot of Latin American works where the timelines jump around unpredictably. Perhaps these points will help readers orient themselves.
This week RantWoman's conversations with God have been going something like this:
"We are called to be faithful, not necessarily successful...."
"God does not call the equipped; he equips the called."
God, are you sure? Really? Is that what you mean?
"...walk with me, mentor elder, friend...."
God, are you out of your ever-loving mind?
"You may only elder someone if you like them?" Uhhhhh, can I please just start about answering that of God within. If we're really, really lucky, maybe RantWoman the really, really bad Buddhist will come up with a spell of Buddhism, sit with the problem and probe what the situation is trying to teach us.
"God accepts us....already good enough for God."
RantWoman is going to be a sort of "show your work" Quaker here. RantWoman is doing this to spell out movements of Spirit in surprising lurches and muddling. Please bear with some details and excursions. Also, this item is part of the reason RantWoman's brain is still not back from NPYM Annual Session in Missoula. RantWoman's body has been back for several weeks, but her mind is still somewhere in transit.
RantWoman was not being a well-adjusted blind person at Annual Session. Despite a lifetime of visual ups and downs, every new phase is one dang trial and error experiment after another and predictably not always a happy one. RantWoman does not always know what help she needs until she tries or fails to try something and has to try something else. RantWoman also was not faking it nearly as well as in the past.
RantWoman was having particular problems planning ahead enough to ask someone the location of things like the interest groups she signed up for or wanted to attend. This meant the first day of interest groups, RantWoman held ad-hoc interest group for sitting on couches and upholding the work of people in important Yearly Meeting roles such as Annual Session Recording Clerk, Clerk of NPYM IT committee, and member of NPYM Ministry and Oversight.
In this form of service, RantWoman starts by not doing anything beyond seating herself on a couch or bench and being available to whoever comes by. This can be a dangerous ministry in that it has a time or two in the past attracted opportunities and offers of responsibility. RantWoman really cannot see out of the fog well enough to initiate any contact herself RantWoman will say Hi to whoever speaks to her while RantWoman appears to be staring trying to pick enough features out of the visual fog to identify people she might indeed want to initiate contact with.
RantWoman was blessed by the people who found her. RantWoman does not in the least regret missing Interest Groups the first day and actually was grateful to be able to fill this role. However, the second day of Interest Groups, RantWoman was determined to actually go to an Interest Group but RantWoman was still being obtuse about needing to be proactive to get the info she needed. RantWoman was debating between Broken and Tender with Marge Abbott, Integrity with the committee revising Faith and Practice, and Conflict and Eldering with a certain problematic mentor figure.
Looking back, RantWoman is considering whether she just wnet straight to Broken and Tender without even reading the book. Before RantWoman gets to that point, she should at least indulge in a good rant about all the reasons reading is hard, there are not enough of the new books people she knows are publishing available in accessible formats, and related whines. One thing at a time.
RantWoman had already had two different conversations with Friends about conflict in their Meetings. RantWoman had conversation with two someones else interested in seeing how things went. Off we all trooped to the location of guess what topic, unencumbered by information about where the other two interest groups RantWoman was considering would be taking place.
By the time this gets published, RantWoman will have survived one last gosh-dang round of minutes related to a certain nomination. Honestly, nerves are still kind of raw and some threads of conversation either very taut or not connected at all about RantWoman's leading that she needed permission from NO ONE, including the workshop leader, to have leadings about service on a certain committee in her home Meeting.
In light of this, RantWoman freely admits that attending this workshop COULD be considered kind of stalkerish. RantWoman was also vexed when one of the Friends she came with wound up not being able to stay because of an ADA issue. Seating was such and Friends had arrived such that it was going to be difficult both for RantWoman to get out of the room and to go find another interest group without being late and really obtrusive in arriving. RantWoman took a deep breath, decided to uphold the people she had already talked with, decided to center on ways for things to be okay, and opted to stay where she was.
Problematic Mentor Figure is in fact frequently a good teacher about the topic and the intro go-around revealed many Friends with conflicts on their minds. RantWoman is the sort of presumptious student who might expect, despite no topical teaching experience, to express at least curiosity about combining two topics, both of which seem large in one short Interest Group. The Interest Group was proceeding; RantWoman mostly was fine with review from her March orgy of conflict resolution trainings and she was thinking about problems in her life outside Meeting. Then there were various instructional and conversational hiccups which RantWoman has since tried with limited success to probe with the Interest Group Leader.
But never mind. Here is where the mental hiccups led. RantWoman had also been thinking about matters on her blog, including the challenge of how to write of Friend Who Brings Odd Teas and Likes to Help in the Kitchen. The conversational hiccup at the Interest Group prodded RantWoman into a whole bunch of observations.
First, RantWoman wrote a blog entry but to date has never actually talked to any humans about how badly it freaks RantWoman out on safety grounds to try to work with people in her Meeting's kitchen. RantWoman had already made the decision, despite a certain affection for the Ministry of Moving Large Muscles and Banging Things, that RantWoman would limit her presence in her Meeting's kitchen on safety grounds. RantWoman is unclear why the conflict resolution workshop led RantWoman to the firm thought that she at least might have complained about this issue when Nominating Committee tried haltingly once again to sell RantWoman on this sphere of activity but did grab hold of the reminder that, really, RantWoman SHOULD try to speak more freely of all her evolving experiments with her new realities.
One of the events which caused RantWoman to realize she needed a different ministry involved two different Friends, hot liquids, performance anxiety due to the presence of Relatives of a Deceased, and a loud, stress-inducing and confrontation between said two Friends. RantWoman has since learned that the phrase hidden disability was applicable on both sides; RantWoman was also unsettled during the Conflict Resolution Interest group to realized that, half-blind fog and all, at the moment of the kitchen events, she was the closest thing available to a functioning adult.
RantWoman is pretty sure this excursion was not really where Interest Group Leader thought he was going, likely partly for tender reasons of his own. In fact, he dismissively used the word "tangent" in an email exchange about the conversational hiccup and RantWoman's key takeaways from the Interest Group. RantWoman for her part also felt the conversational hiccup was getting near territory too tender to be scraped over in public and is going to have to file that theme on her "be tender and proactive in the future" list.
Back to RantWoman's self-inflicted orgy of conflict resolution classes in March. RantWoman hereby offers an account of all the irritations she got fed. http://rantwoman.blogspot.com/2010/03/conflict-and-irritation-without.html . Both series presentations did well about ways to Irritate RantWoman, but the evening the class covered de-escalation was especially bumpy. RantWoman's point: although she has had technical customer service jobs where she has had to de-escalate all kinds of things, a whole bunch of circumstances got in the way of absorbing the de-escalation material in March,
Add the kitchen episode starring two Friends, neither of whom could de-escalate the situation at the moment of the incident. There were hot liquids. There was screaming. RantWoman has no idea what happened, and the fact that one party stomped out of the room in a fit was actually fine, way better than any words at that point and one really direct way to reduce conflictive behavior and increase safety.
Again, RantWoman in retrospect is not ecstatic to realize that, freaked out as she already was on safety grounds, she was also the closest thing available at that moment to a responsible adult. RantWoman had subsequent conversations with half of the screaming encounter. RantWoman learned that this Friend's reaction was probably not voluntary, was in fact out of this Friend's immediate control. RantWoman also learned that said Friend has had previous unpleasant encounters with Friend Who Brings Odd Teas and expects Friend Who Brings Odd Teas to remember and to be able to avoid future difficulties.
RantWoman knows Friend Who Brings Odd Teas in a context outside Meeting. This means for instance that RantWoman knows some of Friend who Brings Teas' immediate neighbors and knows that these people can be even more of a challenge than Friend who Brings Odd Teas. The conversational hiccup in the workshop at Annual Session led RantWoman to an awkward realization: Friend who Brings Odd Teas cannot even avoid unpleasant encounters with some of her difficult neighbors who are difficult all the time. It is completely unrealistic to expect her to be able to remember to avoid unpleasant encounters with someone such as the other Friend who is only, to be frank, unhinged very intermittently. Here we get to the "equips the called..." piece: Presto, RantWoman is equipped with experience and words that do not need more specificity in a blog. RantWoman would so like it if all this equipment would just go call on someone else.
Friend Who Brings Odd Teas attended the same series of conflict resolution workshops as RantWoman, the ones written about in the link above. RantWoman knows from speaking to Friend who brings Teas that she absorbed about the same percentage of the conflict resolution class as she does of educational events at Meeting, which is to say not a lot and she has a really good excuse. Unfortunately, the really good excuse is not really a lot of fun for anyone.
In the Annual Session interest group, RantWoman realized that if she waited until she really liked Friend Who Brings Odd Teas to talk again about things causing Friend Who Brings Odd Teas difficulties, nothing was going to happen. RantWoman also realized that the other half of the difficult encounter probably can be relied on fitfully. To make matters worse, RantWoman has no confidence that she will be able to impart any more information to Friend who Brings Odd Teas than ever, but the "God, are you out of your ever-loving mind" part of the workshop is that RantWoman has to try. Not only does RantWoman have to try, RantWoman in general is going to have to put out her own needs and issuess more unrelentingly. This sounds TIRESOME to RantWoman, but there appears to be no choice.
Along comes a certain theme, "walk with me...." ALL RantWoman can do is walk with Friend Who Brings Odd teas and see whether more helpful words or review of the exercises we attended together will suggest themselves.
RantWoman is also assembling some other data she is not only not happy about but praying ardently to have Held tenderly, Walk with Me, and not just glossed over but that is another whole topic, one for more seasoning.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment