Spoons and Twitches

RantWoman will shortly resume her inchoate ranting; in the meantime....

Today, RantWoman is feeling especially blessed with opportunities to rant in the direction of people who discount her experiences without even interacting with what is on RantWoman's mind. Okay, RantWoman's mind is a very big salad bowl of messy particularities that take up a lot of time in conversation. RantWoman's particularities come from realms where many Friends just never go and the path to common language is not always obvious. Yet RantWoman insists in continuing to hang out and try. RantWoman means to start back with sudoku--and email. RantWoman REALLY does not know when to quit, another feature remarked upon in a recent conversation.

At the moment RantWoman wishes this persistence felt like a spiritual gift; RantWoman has to test the possibility that it is just bullheadedness. Unfortunately RantWoman has, also., to test the possibility that the way she has put a whole lot of circumstances together is thinking beyond others' Light. Maybe that piece is not DESPARATELY urgent, or maybe if RantWoman tends things carefully either others will catch up or something more transformative will come to fruition.

In RantWoman's experience it is sometimes the particularities more than any generalization that evoke the resonance where communication occurs. For instance, RantWoman remember's a classmate at "blind school" speaking of juvenile diabetes, her mother and a syringe and an orange that so profoundly resonated with some of RantWoman's struggles with RantMom that RantWoman decided the whole week of long bus trips for occasionally thin and exasperating content was worth the effort.

Around RantWoman's Meeting RantWoman is STILL hearing things that sound more like "Go away, we don't know how to deal" possibly understandable in terms of modern frenzy more easily than "Friend, what does thee mean by that?" However, RantWoman is also hearing openings and Friends who share the direction of her concerns if not exactly unity about what actions are suggested. RantWoman is hearing many who also are overwhelmed by numbers of circumstances. RantWoman is meditating about numbers of situations where "go away, we don't know how to deal" seems to be pushing away something valuable in the whole conversation even if difficult in the moment.

Finally, RantWoman hears meditations about the word safety. On one hand, RantWoman thinks people are not born knowing how to talk to each other and learning to talk looms large in matters of safety. On the other hand, RantWoman thinks life is not necessarily all about safety and encounters with the Holy Spirit are not guaranteed to be "safe."

RantWoman also gets to be grateful--again, in that ironic, on the path to spiritual perfection sense--for pleas to be direct. What the #@$*#( do people think this is, Wendy's? This is RantWoman's spiritual compost heap we're talking about, not fast food. RantWoman has little experience with the "God as personal butler" model of Divine presence. Perhaps this is what explains RantWoman's persistence in conversations of the form "Friend, season thyself." "That's what I'm trying to figure out how to do. Do you have any suggestions about the how?"

RantWoman herself has to plod along frighteningly slowly and collect data and turn things over. Considering the glacial pace of RantWoman's compost heap, RantWoman SUPPOSES it is not necessarily reasonable to expect others to get the picture quickly either, but who said anything about reasonable?

RantWoman at least gets to be grateful for people hanging in and occasionally seeding the process with thoughtful questions.

Some lovely blog links RantWoman means to hold onto.

This item contains both a link to a Friends Journal article about making Meeting accessible to young families and further reflection on accessibility for adults.

http://aquakerwitch.blogspot.com/2011/03/friends-journal-article-on-young.html

The Spoon theory about always trying to catch up with things in the way:
http://www.butyoudontlooksick.com/articles/written-by-christine/the-spoon-theory-written-by-christine-miserandino/

Rantwoman loves the spoons theory for things like reasons RantWoman does not click through to every link she might like to delve into, why 600+ comments on an article sound intimidating even if it is very likely there is more good content there....

ONE of RantWoman's several ministries at the moment is making lots of people at
her Meeting interact with how RantWoman experiences the world. RantWoman has definitely been doing too good a job of shielding a lot of people
from it partly because it takes so much energy to get in people's
faces and keep getting in people's faces, partly because RantWoman's life is so rich in reasons to get in people's faces that matters of Meeting life rise to the top of the compost heap only intermittently. It occurs to RantWoman that selected Friends also might find it helpful for RantWoman to make more visible the consistency between things RantWoman gets in people's faces about at Meeting and in the rest of her life. But that would be WAY too much for today.