If there has to be a Called Meeting Handout 1

August 23, 2019

(RantWoman)

Friends

I am sorry I have hurt people. I want to make amends and to help release the energy I think is present in the community. I cannot do any of those things without direct engagement both in difficult realities and the many forms of care we show for each other.

Meeting is very important to me and I am NOT called simply to go away. I am not called to go visit my current concerns on another Meeting. I am not called to be silent about my concerns about this community, both its internal health and in light of the changes swirling around our neighborhood. I am called to express my gratitude for many positive moments which have nurtured me both for life in the Meeting and for work in the wider world. I am called to stay put and to try to address problems and vision for a richer spiritual community going forward. I am called to tell you all I think there is opportunity here, opportunity to learn about issues likely to affect all of us in one way or another, opportunity to learn, paths to beloved community.

Despite MANY imperfections and abuses, a solid spiritual grounding at Meeting has steadied me in the face of many circumstances

·         Long history of political activism, advocacy, public ministry—please choose your term

·         The reality of having bad vision my whole life and the continuing emotional work of what that has meant for me personally, for my family, and in terms of growth in faith.

·         My medical moments when DNA lotto kicked in again in midlife and I had to learn whole new life strategies, coping skills, and technologies and to find ways to leverage life experience in new arenas including, to use an academic term I find annoying, to interrogate the world of Disability.  

·         My sister’s very difficult medical history

·         Two rounds of cancer treatment for my mother, a move to Seattle and transition from driving to transit and public transportation.

·         My housing challenges due in equal parts to Oh Good Grief personal decisions on my part, the subprime mortgage fiasco, and medical emergencies.

·         Transition from previous work lives to new ways of serving the community and nurturing my concerns for sustainability, neighborliness, and community connections.

At this point in my life, I feel very lucky to have stable housing, a comparatively large apartment by Seattle standards and ample nearby public transportation options. The housing has come with opportunities I could not have predicted to leverage life experience about IT issues, develop new project management skills and to engage in important public processes about transportation, affordable housing, and the whole business of creating peaceable community.

I have also learned many things I am bad at, not only as reflected in Friends complaints about me but also in other environments. I find it oddly comforting that complaint streams have much in common. In some cases, such as basically endless out of the box thinking, complaints reflect ways I have been driving co-workers crazy for years. One of the gifts of living in Seattle is that there are actually people used to thinking in terms of whole system design; sometimes this means that what is out of some people’s boxes most definitely still falls into other shared boxes.

There have now been many months of minutes with my name all over them. As I said, I am not ungrateful for some feedback. However I need Friends to reflect on some things that are stunningly absent: mention of actual specific efforts to deal with disability, absence of common terminology about disability, absence of ANY awareness about the topics listed above and others that I engage with the wider world. Do Friends think you have correctly defined problems? What openings are there if Friends consider…?

In Light and Faithfulness

(RantWoman)