Car ride clearness Committee with Corn Chips and Fresh Caffeine from Cle Elum

For the record, RantWoman has a Clearness Committee. RantWoman would say her clearness committee is functioning tolerably well. We meet at erratic intervals. We check in and hold changes in each other's lives. Questions get asked. Sometimes answers emerge. Sometimes we just sit with matters in silence. Sometimes RantWoman goes home. Sludge rattles loose in RantWoman's head on the bus ride home or while schlepping about the next day. Sometimes new Light comes. Sometimes RantWoman realizes one or another party has completely missed the point. Sometimes, it becomes clear that something else entirely is needed.

This is a longwinded way of saying RantWoman's current clearness committee is in no way responsible for anything causing consternation in RantWoman's current leading to oblige key individuals in her Meeting to observe National Disabilities Awareness Month. For one thing, RantWoman's entire observance is timed partly as a protest of Quaker Time. If RantWoman waited around to ask her Clearness Committee, this month might get observed sometime in the next millenium, probably after Ambassador Thwack the Badly Behaved White Cane becomes a Friend by convincement.

Coming back from Quarterly Meeting, RantWoman and her car ride companions stopped in Cle Elum for a round of caffeine, lattes all around. We left before lunch to help one of us get to work on time figuring we would munch on the giant bag of corn chips in the car. RantWoman's car ride companions had been listening to RantWoman's oblique grumbles while riding to and fro; they generously formed an ad-hoc clearness committee:

RantWoman, what do you want from your Meeting?

(RantWoman, thinking about how to translate the thought that abject groveling apology for various sins of omission and commission would be nice into acceptable Quakerese)

I really need reliable signals. Have I completely confused or offended you? USE YOUR WORDS because I darn sure cannot read your face. Okay, so lots of people have trouble even telling their right from their left when they try to give directions or orient RantWoman. How the heck can RantWoman necessarily expect Friends will automatically have the right words? Who said anything about RantWoman being reasonable?

There are some simple things that help a lot and that I want LOTS of people to know, but I do not always know instantly what the simple message I need to send is.

I really cannot identify things I CAN change or even apologize about if that is needed until way opens to figure out how to deal better with things I cannot change. So cope, because that's what I get to do too.

It's all trial and error and continuing revelation. If you are not up to that, it feels to me like you are not up to the workings of God. I am trying to leave that between you and God, but it feels like a rift, a disconnecting inconvenience and nuisance between us and I do not like that.

Perhaps that is enough to sit with, besides some blog bits:

http://gtitl.blogspot.com/2011/10/this-i-know-experimentally.html

the parable of the sower: some bear fruit, some fall on fallow ground, some lie about awhile before they germinate.

The ministry of Facebook and in-person contact. RantWoman was amused to learn from the editor of Western Friend that an item from a RantWoman letter to the editor of Western Friend turned up on Facebook, a zone where RantWoman really can only interact with teaspoonsful of the info torrents there. RantWoman guesses sometimes she gets to emit messages into the universe in faith regardless of whether RantWoman even learns of their fruit.