Hard time require furious dancing. Curious dancing? Furious Dancing.

"Ah but I was so much older then. I'm so much younger than that now."

Bob Dylan.

Someone among RantWoman's readers needs to hear that. Maybe, at 80, the world needs less than ever to hear Dylan sing his own stuff even if we need his poetry more than ever.

The late Miss Molly Mae
as rendered by her human
in watercolor

RantWoman is arguing with herself about Blog as Quaker journal again. RantWoman from time to time considers whether it would be desirable to separate better crafted more intentional items from the daily layers of RantWoman's spiritual compost heap. Here again, the idea is going nowhere.

RantWoman is extremely grateful right now for FCNL Witness Wednesday.

 RantWoman is grateful for hopeful young faces. 

RantWoman is grateful for reflection prompts for one thing because she is not sure she could have handled such things in her most unsettled days of young adulthood . 

RantWoman is grateful, even when breakout room process seems awkward, for the connections because of breakout rooms. 

Some weeks more so than others, RantWoman has a sense, partly lingering from her own much younger days in the Nation's capital, of being present for all that happens there. And by "all" RantWoman means muddling FCNL priorities with American Council of the Blind priorities with a smattering of post cold war geopolitics and global security concerns. Stop worrying about nuclear weapons and build sidewalks to help wean us off of...?

This week's Prompt for Reflection:

"I am the youngest of eight siblings. Five of us have died. I share losses, health concerns, and other challenges common to the human condition, especially in these times of war, poverty, environmental devastation, and greed that are quite beyond the most creative imagination. Sometimes it all feels a bit too much to bear. Once a person of periodic deep depressions...I have matured into someone I never dreamed I would become: an unbridled optimist who sees the glass as always full of something. It may be half full of water, precious in itself, but in the other half there's a rainbow that could exist only in the vacant space. I have learned to dance."

~ Preface to Hard Times Require Furious Dancing, by Alice Walker

 Note: at one point RantWoman's fingers were trying for "curious dancing."

There were more messages than sometimes

Two additional poems were shared, The Dance by Wendell Barry and and one whose title RantWoman does not remember by Ross Bleckner

Readers who want to read these poems are invited to use their search engines. RantWoman's too many poems at once threshold is pretty low. After that, repeats just kind of drip down RantWoman's face, kind of like biting into a whole ripe tomato.

The word dancing went all kinds of directions during worship and now writing of it even more directions. All that is probably a pretty good clue that nothing digestible was going to make it out of RantWoman's mouth during worship.

RantWoman currently has a pet earworm, left over on Youtube from the 2015 Eurovision song contest when Sweden won. Part of the lyrics are about "dancing with the demons in our minds."  

Dancing should not seem unattainable to anyone somehow, but RantWoman made the mistake of sending dancing images to two people on her daily silly emojis list. One is recovering from "brain stuff" and actual physical dancing is not even fathomable. The other is recovering from  serious hit and run traffic violence assault. "Dancing" means 4 hours in her garden with many rest breaks but still much gardening. "dancing" means 3 quarter mile laps around the track at a nearby high school but definitely not crossing streets yet.

Dancing for one now-deceased Quaker wheelchair user was a sweet love story. After he and his wife split up, he met a woman who liked to dance. One year for Community Night at Annual Session, they couple "danced," the woman on foot  and the Friend with his wheelchair all tricked out in colorful lights. 

In graduate school RantWoman had a housemate who was an anthropology grad student studying Irish set dancing. Housemate had no problem counting out the steps for different dances but was almost completely lost about any other kind of math including the basic arithmetic of things like household utility bills. 

RantWoman has another friend, a native New Yorker now teaching computer science in Kentucky. This friend is seriously into contra dancing, and not the Latin American anti-revolutionary kind. This friend now posts pictures of herself on Facebook learning new dances with a large teddy bear because he husband's Parkinsonism gets in the way too much to dance anymore.

Time was also when University meeting rented space on Saturday nights one a month to one of the local square dance groups. Many people found their way to worship because of the dance connections. Even before the pandemic hit, local dance groups ability to rent spaces dried up and RantWoman misses the two-way energy flow.

But please yes, never stop speaking of dance, furious, curious....