From Gleamings: In-Person Brown Bag Lunch
October 3
The Community Building Committee is organizing a brown bag lunch for the greater UFM community outdoors at the meetinghouse. It is open to everyone who wants to attend, even if they do not attend in-person worship. We’ll gather on October 3 at the rise of 11:00am Meeting for Worship. We have elected to do this brown bag style (i.e., bring your own lunch) so that there is minimal prep and clean up.
This is also just before the Pastoral Care Committees retreat, so we encourage those attendees to join. We hope to see you there!
Oh Hell. RantWoman was already feeling all trippy and time-travel-ly about a previous pastoral care committee when what to RantWoman's wonky and variably itchy eyeballs should appear but the above announcement. RantWoman is not sure the announcement is an invitation to a historical inventory of many Do Better Next Time themes, seasoned with the terms life-changing medical events, vocational rehababilitation and faith communities as SOMETIMES fertile grounds for the kind of recovery implied by rehabilitation.
RantWoman found it frighteningly easy to rattle off just such an inventory. RantWoman will now season whether to dump here, to email selected participants, or just to leave things be.
But first RantWoman offers Light as it arrived in connection with Quarterly meeting, in connection also with time and Zoom connectivity allowing RantWoman to sojourn among many geographical clumps and theological flavors of Friends, but mainly her local Quarterly Meeting.
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Take me to your virtual
Quarterly Meeting.
Try, try, try to catch up on sleep
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Quarterly Meeting?
One of RantWoman's time travel zip back and forth hiccups involved communications about accessibility matters for an event to be held before a previous Quarterly Meeting. One Friend in the picture, notorious for in RantWoman's experience being hard to reach, perhaps not realizing what the conversation needed to be about suggested holding the needed conversation at Quarterly Meeting. Perhaps for now we file that history with the messages that kept coming to RantWoman AT this year's Quarterly Meeting about the need to figure out how to get along better in order to deal with climate change.
Cherry tomato plants, squashes, trees
RantWoman has written previously of how Quarterly Meeting drew on the work of Joanna Macy. One exercise sent people away to worship for 20 minutes with some non-human being and the let Zoom pair people up to talk about the conversations. RantWoman asked one Friend afterward and that Friend shared that she had talked to a cherry tomato plant that had borne enough fruit to feed the Friend's household as well as many neighbors, but that the cherry tomato plant was done for the year.
RantWoman was paired with a Friend whose cherry tomato plant had gotten all spindly and dried up but had borne some fruit. The plant told the Friend that its pot was too small and the Friend had not watered it enough, but it too was done for the year and the Friend would do better next year. RantWoman is grateful for mention of eyes and glasses and Zoom and also for resonance with "Do Better Next Time" themes even though RantWoman is CRYSTAL clear that some of the Do better next times need more people that the Zoom pairing.
Long after the exercise was done, RantWoman had a conversation with a cherry tomato plant she had grown on her balcony, years ago when RantWoman had a building manager who tolerated growing things on balconies. RantWoman's plant also had too small a pot, got spindly, bore a little fruit. Mostly it told RantWoman that 4 floors up there are no pollinators and RantWoman didn't hand pollinate well. In the realm of do better and new openings, RantWoman realizes there are new staff and as the community comes out of COVID, maybe some energy could coalesce about growing and respectfully tending plants in big pots on the patio. That would require serious neighbor skills. But it could be better than now.
RantWoman has peculiar visions / hopes that all the balconies on new housing being built near RantWoman will sprout urban gardens. Plus it's orange food season, so RantWoman wound up talking to squashes unavailable anywhere near her household except with digressions about grocery shopping. RantWoman was thinking of plants that grow all over the place, of gourds and finding water,
Never mind building rules. Balcony squash growing should probably never be a thing unless one has a really big balcony. The squashes kindly pointed out that RantWoman is unlikely to summon the effort needed to sign up for, let alone tend to a nearby P-patch and then suggested that RantWoman still needed to be faithful to her Light about grocery shopping, cars and new housing and transit. Luckily some trees RantWoman lives near also told RantWoman they are there; she needs only to look out her window, or off her balcony and honor the reality that she has much better treescapes than many new apartments.
Then cars, as in too many cars entered the conversation. RantWoman tends to continue conversations in her head even after other people exit and the cars point made RantWoman collide with another Do Better Next Time point to hold in the Light.
The Four-person Exercise
After everyone had a Meeting for Business, genuine gifts at Community Night, and a good night's sleep, there was more work to be done.
This time Zoom was to group people in 4's. Friends were to take turns going around each playing one of the roles:
--State an Intention or a Leading
--Be the voice of doubt
--Be the voice of an ancestor
--Be the voice of the future.
RantWoman, to be honest, did not even note the words of anyone else's cycle except her own.
RantWoman stated an intention to continue to be a pain in the ass about accessibility and disability inclusion.
The voice of doubt: What makes RantWoman think she can do good trouble? This Friend has previously basically also used the term "good trouble" about exactly this topic. The short answer: RantWoman is doing plenty of trouble. Now can we try and get to Good trouble? The longer answer: the call does not go away even when RantWoman desperately wishes maybe she could just stop caring.
But RantWoman, National Disability Employment Awareness Month? Some of this soap opera is definitely not up to what you would like to expect of yourself, right? Um, well, if workplaces were up to the standards RantWoman hopes the entire Diversity Equity Inclusion industry would also disappear. Since we're not talking ideal on either side and the problem is NOT GOING TO DISAPPEAR, let's keep at it.
Yeah, yeah and There are still two voices: Disabled people should have equal access to jobs and fulfilling careers. Also, no one's ability to survive should depend on their value to capitalism?
Does RantWoman have a clearness committee? RantWoman burst out laughing. Life in community is one long clearness committee? That is a good thing considering RantWoman's experiences with actual clearness committees. But maybe part of Good trouble is to help grow community capacity to DO actual clearness committees, to DO BETTER NEXT TIME.
The Ancestor Voice left RantWoman with the words: less belligerent more civil as well as questions. Does RantWoman really INTEND to be a pain in the ass (or is that a side-effect of the call)? The ancestor voice suggested aiming for humor, lightness. RantWoman's immediate reaction "there's NOTHING funny about...(and RantWoman WILL in fact flirt more with standup comedy)."
RantWoman also has ancestor voices in her head that make her say, Friend, elder, you keep missing my point and ducking things RantWoman is pretty sure would help but let's try for teamwork to share the load. In that vein, RantWoman is grateful to have spent all week zooming with early to mid-career professionals speaking climate change fighting for equity building inclusivity nurturing Truth to their professional elders.
Apparently RantWoman did not make clear enough that the call to make Good trouble starts closer to her community and THEN extends outward. The Voice of the Future said past generations have screwed up transportation royally. Thank you for recognizing need to change trajectory about how to get around without less price for the planet. Perhaps it has to be okay that nothing had particularly made it out of RantWoman's mouth about generations of disability experience and the lurches and faltering steps of progress and learnings and relearnings and continuing revelation. RantWoman will also grab the phrase "stay in relationship" and not worry that RantWoman had in mind many spheres when voicing her intentions.
RantWoman has been sitting for a long time with how easy it was to pen a "Do better next time" email, with comments from various Friends and with what to say before today's pastoral care retreat.
RantWoman, why you gotta post this stuff all over your blog?
Because one on one conversations are exhausting.
Because the community needs to be held in the Light.
Because George Fox said be patterns, be examples but did not say if you are being bad examples, just Stop it. NOT everything is a bad example but there are some TERRIBLE moments and RantWoman does NO ONE any favors by pretending people are going to figure that out on their own.
Because one conversation about burning bridges made RantWoman think of a job interview question where the right answer was burn the box, burn the box of limited thinking. Be open to new thinking. The first part of a definition of accessibility is people being willing to talk about it to open their minds. Besides, the University Bridge near meeting is a drawbridge. Drawbridges go up and down.
Okay, okay, RantWoman is going to distill two emails and put the most incendiary language in a cover email.
I exactly get that some of my communications have been AWFUL. I feel very badly that more than one thing I would characterize as trying to grow community awareness or capacity has been taken personally and not succeeded as intended. I get that a number of people do not fee appreciated and in a sense they are correct: there are points I absolutely DO NOT appreciate and think the community can do better about. I am glad the world is bigger than a number of individuals and I am NOT CALLED TO GO AWAY
--various other professional and family experiences, some of which I can predict flare up for different reasons at different times of the year and for other reasons.
....
I am grateful for a response any response and the Friend who responded offered several comments that made me want to expand and clarify a few thoughts.
1. I have a therapist. She is very good. I see her as often as I can afford and pay out of pocket in preference to the options covered by my insurance. In terms of working out complex situations therapy timeis limited and not the right venue for circumstances involving otherpeople.
2. Friend, I asked about a process described as "Composting for Renewal" because people make choices about who to speak to about concerns and because then I get to discern what needs to happen further with the information supplied.
3. There are several points here that relate to officers responsibilities and nonprofit basics. I will say more about what I have in mind in another message
4. The phrase Truth and Reconciliation came up in FLGBTQC worship. It seems on point along with the general point that when someone makes accommodations requests, the time to deal with them is promptly, not when some other organization muddles through a process. I would welcome an invitation to expand on what I am talking about.
5. I said September is hard for me and simply holding in the lightmatters. That was one of the points behind my message at the close of worship at QM but not of course the only point since I mentioned others who need to be held in the Light.
And RantWoman AGAIN posts the following links
Specific Asks
On Eldering, to be held in the Light
And finally, this week's item from Johan Maurer
A post on conflict, worship, community, history
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