Holiday visual motifs and new tags

During this impending winter of #pandemic and soon-to-be-exPresidential shenanigans, RantWoman is striving to be festive, to cultivate grace, to draw out the best in all, most of all herself. 

Okay, this is RantWoman. Let's try for festive and try to hold holy whatever comes along.

RantWoman offers clues to visual motifs and then presents some new tags. Hopefully the new tags will be more self-explanatory than some of the existing ones RantWoman is in love with. RantWoman does not promise to go back and add tags to many old posts where they belong. This is the unedited version of Blog as Quaker Journal.

Visual motifs and what they mean

Christmas Cactuses: GRATITUDE

Plant Exchange Christmas Cactus plants
with Pinkish White and darker pink blossoms 

RantWoman is grateful for the UFM Plant Exchange. RantWoman remembers a retreat when she was very new to Quakers by a married couple who had worked extensively on conflict resolution in Northern Ireland. RantWoman remembers bringing the plant with the darkest pink blossoms to the workshop. RantWoman does not remember why she brought the plant to the workshop, but let us imagine many cycles of blooming as part of conflict resolution.

Random images of holiday Gifts: 

These will be intended both as appreciations of gifts, efforts that are very meaningful to RantWoman and donations of unsolicited in-kind technical assistance

New tags

Grace

Forgiveness

Since we are discussing holiday themes, RantWoman needs to comment on one theme from a previous year: readers may have noticed that one year recently RantWoman observed Hanukkah with a bunch of "Nothing Appropriate" visual images. RantWoman realizes the entire series may have had different impact for some people than RantWoman intended. RantWoman in no way INTENDED to slam an entire religion. If anything, RantWoman intended to highlight abundant ignorance floating around in US culture. RantWoman also was symbolically working out how to deal with lingering and recurring fury with the RantParents for doing nothing appropriate about one situation stuck in RantWoman's mind along with other holiday memories. RantWoman's tasks are both to figure out more concisely what needs to be said to whom and when and to heed the call about forgiving 70x 7 times  RantWoman apologizes if this theme offended anyone and hopes that this explanation can help anyone concerned sit with a more complex picture.

RantWoman also offers confessions. 

First, RantWoman has adequately spoken to NO ONE about how helpful some forms of Quaker service were in helping RantWoman stay on her feet psychologically while dealing with SOME aspects of midlife vision loss. Plop another Christmas Cactus of Gratitude here about this topic even though the conversation will quickly degenerate into WHY CAN'T YOU MAKE TIME TO LISTEN...?

Second, but related to the first, recently in connection with one of the hats RantWoman wears outside Meeting, RantWoman wrote a "How NOT to do it" skit about how to lobby legislators. The skit was a blind mother, with an unreasonable ask, on a Zoom call with a legislator. The mother had several distractions. The senator did not know very much about blindness and did things like yawn out loud. In other words, both sides found many reasons to be less than charmed by the encounter. Despite all of this, the two did get to an agreement to explore the topic further. 

RantWoman's confession: she had WAY too much fun writing the How Not to Do It Skit. RantWoman is also seasoning an abundance of How NOT to do It material on her blog. RantWoman asks readers to bear with her and to try to extract nuggets of wisdom. Stay tuned...