Crossings

RantWoman had one of her dragged to her feet, called to ministry, message miraculously trimmed into coherence moments one recent First Day.
The cauldron of themes seething over RantWoman's inner blowtorch precipitated a message that was coherent, hopefully shorn of excess detail. After the message RantWoman resumed her seat. Silence held for several minutes eventhough the children had already entered and RantWoman had a spell of feeling warm, on the threshold of something. The message was well-received enough to draw multiple comments besides a request from Call Me Up and I Will Figure It Out For You Friend to try to reconstruct.
Here, first, is the reconstruction:

Thank you so much for speaking up about the hearing issue. I will keep trying to do the best I can in Meeting for Worship. I usually also have to pray that only the most essential elements come out but that all the elements I need are there. I feel blessed about the latter in this case but I also feel blessed to be able to reconstruct and tweak here.



Here is a little more or less is the message that came to me Sunday.

Please feel free to share it with other people as led. It is part of a whole long chain of thinking about which I expect more may flow. What is here is a little more in places than I got said in Meeting for Worship, but enough landed that I heard from multiple people that something spoke to them related to different thresholds in their life.



[Previous message, Ojibway legend, wolves called love and fear who fight incessantly and love always triumphing over fear. Messages in this vein sometimes severely annoy RantWoman because they seem to imply there is never anything to be afraid of. ]

I think a lot of things can be explained with love and respect for physics. For example I am very glad Jana is with us today. Three years ago this week, Jana was badly injured when a car hit her while she was crossing a street near her home. The physics of car vs mere human are not favorable to the person but Jana had amazing medical care, a huge network of people who love and support her, and phenomenal resilience.
I am very glad Jana is with us today and doing so well. But I thank her also for sharing with me lingering effects of her accident like being twitchy about crossing streets. Because of my vision and other things I also am twitchy about crossing streets. There is a big piece about just respecting physics and being as careful as one can, but there are also hard things one just has to live with. If one has to have something difficult like that in one's life, it's good to have someone to share it with, and I am very grateful to Jana for talking about all the parts of her reality about crossing streets.


I am thinking about crossing streets today for another reason. It's the first week of school, and I think lots of people, not only schoolkids are crossing new thresholds this time of year.
When I started kindergarten, one of the things I had to do was to learn how to cross a busy street. It's about respecting physics, being careful, a good stoplight. Let us all offer a special blessing to people crossing new thresholds, maybe facing hard things for love and care and dealing with hard things.


Query: what thresholds full of fear and trepidation do I have to overcome every day? How do I know when I have made it where I need to be?

But wait! That was the message in Meeting for worship.Lately, RantWoman's inner blowtorch has also wandered toward complaints from some quarters, some people find it exhausting to be around RantWoman. Perhaps RantWoman is getting repetitive but Count your Blessings. Be glad you only have to visit. Be glad you have only your own problems.



Or, if you are feeling hardy enough for another ride at the RantWoman relativistic spiritual amusement park, consider blindness tourism with someone I know named G.



TRIGGER WARNING: frank discussion of blindness minutia; mention of facts of warfare!



G was a new blind customer at the Friendly Neighborhood Center for extreme Computing. RantWoman is not sure whether he came the first time on paratransit or whether RantWoman got him directions from the bus. Most other regulars at the Friendly Neighborhood Center cannot give directions over the phone that work for someone who is totally blind. RantWoman has been around enough such that it comes easily.
RantWoman talked with G for a good while and he asked for directions to the men's room. When he came back he asked RantWoman to help him explore the lobby at the Friendly Neighborhood Center. RantWoman could see from how G organized his instructions that he has excellent mobility skills, that is he travels easily with a white cane. He soon asked to go outside and RantWoman showed him routes between two bus stops and the Friendly Neighborhood Center and talked him toward a third more distant.
Here RantWoman had to stop. One stop would require G to cross a street at an intersection with 5 different streams of traffic on 4 traffic signals. Fully sighted people get headaches. Half the employees at the nearby Lighthouse for the Blind won't cross there except when a sighted staffperson meets a clump of crossers at the beginning or end of their various shifts. RantWoman STRONGLY implored G to get help from a professional. Translation: RantWoman does not feel she has either the background or the nerve to try to teach G herself and does not want to be responsible for him getting himself killed.

Lo and Behold: the next time G came to the Friendly Neighborhood Center....he had...crossed at that very street and done fine. SILLY RantWoman. G lost his sight in a mine explosion in Somalia. A wimpy little urban traffic tangle is NOTHING.