Off the mark
Monday, 6 March 2006 10:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
daYesterday, my entire day seemed to be filled with not getting what I wanted, but rather something better instead. Or a bunch of somethings. I was under-slept, so my perceptions felt a bit off, but the day felt mostly like it was... put there just for me to trip over, as it were. Now that I've gotten a good night's sleep, it still feels that way. I'm writing this out, as much for my own benefit as anyone else's, so I apologize if it's rambly. But I figure you can skip it if you don't want the details.
During Quaker Meeting I was thinking about![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
melted_snowball's and my friend Doug, who died suddenly this last October. I spoke a bit about him in Meeting, how I miss him and yet sort of felt his presence that morning, and I ended with his signature email-line, "Grace! Peace! Love!"
After Meeting was a session with a travelling Friend from Yearly Meeting (the broader group for all of Canada). One thing he's working on is enriching communication between widely-spread Friends. A challenge in Canada is that there are Quakers from Victoria to Yellowknife to Halifax, and spread rather thinly at best. I think we were able to help David to bring useful advice back to his committee, and he gave us things to chew on as well.
An unexpected detour in our discussion was the advantages and difficulties of using the internet for this communication. We can't do Meeting for Worship, nor can we do things that are made possible by being in that sort of head-space, such as Quaker Business Meeting, over email or in a chat-room. There are other things that are simply different when mediated by text on a computer. And there are other things that work well on a computer, as well as those that wouldn't be possible otherwise. This topic is one I have strong opinions; and I've had a few substantial conversations with folks in this Meeting about it, and I'm pleased with how our conversation went on Sunday, that we could get a lot of the nuance in, since we were all on the same page.
On my drive home, I listened to the tail end of Tapestry, the CBC's "spirituality and religion" program. But only with one ear, because I was musing about another conversation after Quaker Meeting. An occasional attender at Meeting has been involved with an anti-violence training program I've tried to be involved with in the past, and apparently they are running this same anti-violence training at the local Correctional Facility at the end of April. Do I want to go to jail to work on this? At one point I was certain I did, but now that it's available here in town instead of three or eight hours away, I"m not sure.
As I pulled into the driveway, the radio switched from one segment to another, a lecture by June Callwood, a journalist and social activist who lives in Toronto. She broke her talk into three parts, and while the official title was something else, she unofficially called it, "Grace, Empathy, and Love". Well, that caught my ear; it would've even if it didn't seem to be an twist on Doug's favourite saying. She had useful, sobering, and interesting things to say, largely about the importance of empathy when one is struck with an urge to be "kind". Sometimes, a person doesn't need "kindness" or "niceness"; that'll only make the giver satisfied that they've helped. I may write more about this lecture later, but now's not the time for that.
A bit later in the afternoon I dug into some research I promised to do, which involved digging through my box of papers. It took me a while to find what I was looking for. Before that, I found a newsletter I'd been looking for for a month (misfiled) and also my sheaf of papers related to my family tree. I'd recently been looking for that, since I wanted to look up names of my maternal grandmother's siblings, who emigrated to the US from Poland/Russia around the turn of the 20th century.
An hour later, I got an email from my mom, saying that she just thought to tell me that her first cousin Leon has been collecting his mother's history together, including a lot of photos from my mom about my grandmother and her siblings, and did I want to see what he's been working on?
It looks pretty neat so far. He's building a DVD with a rather large collection of stories and documents, including FOIA'd immigration documents from Ellis Island, my great-aunt's recipe for gefilte fish, and so on. I'm looking forward to seeing more of it. I do wonder why my mom just thought to mention it right then.
...I also had a surprising google result, twice, but that's too complicated to sumarize so I won't.
So, more or less, that was my Sunday.
Oh, and I guess I just missed running intobats22 at the bakery, but that's only slightly unusual.
During Quaker Meeting I was thinking about
melted_snowball's and my friend Doug, who died suddenly this last October. I spoke a bit about him in Meeting, how I miss him and yet sort of felt his presence that morning, and I ended with his signature email-line, "Grace! Peace! Love!" After Meeting was a session with a travelling Friend from Yearly Meeting (the broader group for all of Canada). One thing he's working on is enriching communication between widely-spread Friends. A challenge in Canada is that there are Quakers from Victoria to Yellowknife to Halifax, and spread rather thinly at best. I think we were able to help David to bring useful advice back to his committee, and he gave us things to chew on as well.
An unexpected detour in our discussion was the advantages and difficulties of using the internet for this communication. We can't do Meeting for Worship, nor can we do things that are made possible by being in that sort of head-space, such as Quaker Business Meeting, over email or in a chat-room. There are other things that are simply different when mediated by text on a computer. And there are other things that work well on a computer, as well as those that wouldn't be possible otherwise. This topic is one I have strong opinions; and I've had a few substantial conversations with folks in this Meeting about it, and I'm pleased with how our conversation went on Sunday, that we could get a lot of the nuance in, since we were all on the same page.
On my drive home, I listened to the tail end of Tapestry, the CBC's "spirituality and religion" program. But only with one ear, because I was musing about another conversation after Quaker Meeting. An occasional attender at Meeting has been involved with an anti-violence training program I've tried to be involved with in the past, and apparently they are running this same anti-violence training at the local Correctional Facility at the end of April. Do I want to go to jail to work on this? At one point I was certain I did, but now that it's available here in town instead of three or eight hours away, I"m not sure.
As I pulled into the driveway, the radio switched from one segment to another, a lecture by June Callwood, a journalist and social activist who lives in Toronto. She broke her talk into three parts, and while the official title was something else, she unofficially called it, "Grace, Empathy, and Love". Well, that caught my ear; it would've even if it didn't seem to be an twist on Doug's favourite saying. She had useful, sobering, and interesting things to say, largely about the importance of empathy when one is struck with an urge to be "kind". Sometimes, a person doesn't need "kindness" or "niceness"; that'll only make the giver satisfied that they've helped. I may write more about this lecture later, but now's not the time for that.
A bit later in the afternoon I dug into some research I promised to do, which involved digging through my box of papers. It took me a while to find what I was looking for. Before that, I found a newsletter I'd been looking for for a month (misfiled) and also my sheaf of papers related to my family tree. I'd recently been looking for that, since I wanted to look up names of my maternal grandmother's siblings, who emigrated to the US from Poland/Russia around the turn of the 20th century.
An hour later, I got an email from my mom, saying that she just thought to tell me that her first cousin Leon has been collecting his mother's history together, including a lot of photos from my mom about my grandmother and her siblings, and did I want to see what he's been working on?
It looks pretty neat so far. He's building a DVD with a rather large collection of stories and documents, including FOIA'd immigration documents from Ellis Island, my great-aunt's recipe for gefilte fish, and so on. I'm looking forward to seeing more of it. I do wonder why my mom just thought to mention it right then.
...I also had a surprising google result, twice, but that's too complicated to sumarize so I won't.
So, more or less, that was my Sunday.
Oh, and I guess I just missed running into
bats22 at the bakery, but that's only slightly unusual.
