Mambo Taxi

What's the word "soul" mean to you? What associations does it bring up? Is the word fraught with baggage... smelling partly of brimstone? Does it have deep connection for you? Is it ineffable and abstract? Is it like a Platonic ideal of a thing, not to be pinned down? Is it boring? Is it a handy fiction?

I'd love to have a conversation about that, to the extent we can in an online journal. Anonymous comments are fine. My hope is to have common referents to continue in another post.

I invite you to make your first comment here, that is to say without reading the previous comments before-hand. Of course feel free to read other comments too, and discuss with others, but after your first comment. :) Thanks!

[Edit to add:

I can say: the breadth of peoples' responses is pretty darn cool.

So, I suggested a dialogue. What now?

It would be one thing if we were in the same room, and could look at each other and be clear that we're going to treat this with the respect it deserved. In that situation, I would say we could just ask each other open, honest questions; questions that don't try to convince the other of our own understanding; but help the other person to articulate their truth for us. And take it from there.

We could try something like that. I'd participate. Why don't we try that?

It might go without saying, but I'll say it anyway: you're welcome to not reply to someone's question, or to reply telling them you won't reply (and that's final; challenges are not OK).

]

Not figuratively, literally. My bike has developed a (dangerous) tendency to lose its gear, often when I'm starting up from still, and also when I'm coasting. Not the chain, but likely the freewheel, according to elbie_at_trig, who was conveniently going home at the same time as me, just as I was thinking, "if only I could ask someone to jog along next to my bike..."

So, yeah. Tomorrow morning, cycle shop is my first stop on the way to work.

Otherwise, I feel like I'm not spinning wheels, quite the opposite.

Work is going, and the three active projects are interesting, if potentially long. But the structure of things allows me to interleaving the work, and I can't imagine getting bored with it. Really, this still feels like perfect job for me. And hey, I missed my boss, who was gone a week on vacation, but I can hardly fault her for that.

Life feels adequately social, these last weeks. Care and feeding of my introverted self- it sometimes feels like I need a push, but I'm getting most of what I need.

This Thursday evening is the third and final Quaker Seekers at Laurier session we have planned; we're speaking on Equality. I think there's an LJ post sitting in my brain, to help me organize what I'm saying in my two 6-minute pieces.

Last week I had a conference-call with co-organizers for the Quaker Quest Traveling Team. A month from now I'll be one of two presenters to a regional Quaker gathering, and in early May they're sending me to Pendle Hill for a weekend conference with other trainers. This work feels both like something I'm pulled to do, and a big side-order of "what the hell was I thinking when I said yes?" Where it goes nobody knows, but I am loving the finding out.

In late May melted_snowball and I are taking a vacation to Nova Scotia for my birthday; it's our first time to Atlantic Canada and I am already having dreams about rocky shorelines and whale-watching.

This week has featured two meals with duck (breast; and burgers), and two meals with pesto. It is a good life, my friends.

I'm midway through installing linux on a mac mini. I'm in love with this hardware; it's so quiet, runs cool, and is barely bigger than my hand. I'm putting Xen-enabled debian onto it, so alongside the web and email services it can run virtual servers such as Asterisk, or possibly freePBX. Anyhow, my coder.com server will move over some time in April, I hope.

Also in April, my geek crew of Perl Mongers are doing a hardware hacking workshop with Arduino microcontroller boards. So far, I've tested sample programs that play a simple tune; flash LEDs; and (sort of) replicate a Clapper but send a signal over USB to computer. My goals are to control a 600x200 pixel LCD display, and to precisely control a stepper-motor to... well, it'll be cool if it works, that's all I will say for now.

So, all you folks who haven't posted about yourselves recently- what's up with you?

I just went to the going-away reception for a colleague of dan's, a man of many talents who is moving west to become a CTO at another University. There were hors d'oeuvre, wine, cheese. And there were many speeches; some entirely professional and largely boring, some more heartfelt messages with personal touches. But you could tell this man will be missed for his even-keeled and wise service to the University.

And so, walking Rover just now, I was trying to determine exactly what I was feeling in response. I thought, for a while, that it was sort of a proxy pride-mixed-with-loyalty; watching all of these people who'd been working together for decades, showing honour to one of their beloved colleagues.

I'd be feeling it by proxy because of course it's second-hand imagining of their pride and loyalty, recognizing their depth of connections over the decades. And while I do feel loyalty to the University (as an excellent employer, as a source of social and societal good, as somewhere I hope to work for a long time) it's not anywhere near the loyalty of someone who had given it his all, for multiple decades, in a career he'd spent his entire life in.

So, I figured this proxy feeling was best personally described as "inspiration". And that was OK.

But you know, that's not quite it. As I watched Rover run in the school-yard I realized something else was more true. What struck me, hearing these profs pay their respects, was a personal profound sense of getting older.

Not in a negative sense, at all. Or, yes, but not only. Realizing it's the way of things. You spend your time on earth in whatever you're going to do; and possibly you pay attention and get better at things (and possibly the things you're better at, manage to find you). And perhaps you are recognized for the things you do, or perhaps you just know, yourself, and that's OK. And maybe if you're very lucky, it makes a great story; or maybe it seems dull.

But it's your life, every step, and you wouldn't be here if you hadn't been there first. And the you, now, can see a lot further because of it. And it's like seeing a photo of yourself from a decade ago with that hair and clothes and realizing shit, I really thought that would look good on me? And like listening to a Quaker friend's twelve-year-old go on about how much he loves watching The Wizard of Oz over and over, and as he gesticulates wildly with his hands, keeping the Cheshire grin to yourself (and thanking God for his parents not being bigots). And it's like recognizing to yourself the dues you've paid, ultimately OK with them even if they were crazy over-priced stupid dues.

And maybe, looking honestly and lovingly at the you-of-half-your-lifespan-ago and whether, if the two of you met, younger-you would laugh out loud in surprise (and maybe awe) at the you-of-now. And you're mostly looking forward to discovering the you-of-the-same-timespan in the future. Shit, he really thought that was a good idea then, didn't he? By God, yes, I do. And you'll please be keeping that smirk to yourself, future-me?

And maybe they won't throw a party with canapés and the University President, which is probably better off if they don't; and maybe actually the worst is yet to come. But maybe you get to use that as a stepping-off point to something even better than you'd ever imagine from here, the you-of-now who is getting older and paying attention and being open to the chance that the best is yet to come.

I need help remembering this.

"The concern-oriented life is ordered and organized from within. And we learn to say No as well as Yes by attending to the guidance of an inner responsibility. Quaker simplicity needs to be expressed not merely in dress and architecture and the height of tombstones but also in the structure of a relatively simplified and coordinated life-program of social responsibilities."

--Thomas Kelly, A Testimony of Devotion, 1941

From Quaker blogger rikomatic.com

(So much for sleepy-bye time. I guess I'll sit up for half an hour, see if I'm sleepy again then. Maybe it was the coffee ice-cream for desert? Dunno.)

I've been wondering what I want to say about my week among the 1,200 Quakers. In advance, I told some people it was like a yearly reunion with some 200 family I really did want to see. I told a few friends that this family was mostly Family, if you catch. For Quakers who had never been, I said it was a rich mix of workshops, Meetings for Worship, and social time. And the best Meetings for Worship I ever have, anywhere. For people who had been before, I said I wasn't taking a workshop, because I was serving on Ministry and Counsel for Friends for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Concerns (FLGBTQC), and I was a bit nervous about how difficult that would be.

How was it? It was excellent. I've rarely been so busy, but at the same time, so guided.. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

On Saturday, I set out in Harold (our Corolla) for Hamilton, where I picked up two passengers, one who'd been on the Go train from Peterborough for two hours already. (metalana, you might know her, she's recently retired as a data-modeler for the Ministry of Natural Resources.) We got acquainted and followed a combination of Google Maps directions and my GPS on a gorgeous route through the topography of western New York and Pennsylvania.

Some of our conversation was about the moribund state of Quakerism in Canada. I caught myself being fairly emphatic about the point, and had a moment of considering what should I be doing with this... push... to do something about it. Well, I feel like I've gotten a bit better at listening to these pushes. After this week, I feel much better about it.

We arrived just in time to register and catch the very tail end of dinner time. I met up with dear friends, started planning my week, and generally blissed out a bit.

Sunday saw me trying to plan meetings, catch up with friends, do committee work, go to meetings, contribute... a pile of things. Plus many naps and walks by myself. And really, that was the tone of the week. Not busy for busy sake, but many things that felt like they needed doing, and for many of them, that I was the right person to do them. That felt really wonderful. Some of this was continuing the story I felt started at the Midwinter Gathering- one major thread, I was on an ad-hoc committee asked to consider a request from FGC's publications arm to help write a pamphlet on welcoming LGBTQ people to Quaker Meetings. Now, Quakers work in committee; and I needed to get between 7 and 9 people together from various other committees to start this work. At Gathering, amongst 1,200 other Quakers, with all of everyone's other committments? It felt impossible, especially since 4 or so of them didn't know yet they were being called into this meeting.

We did it. And it's moving forward, for next Midwinter.

So, about feeling guided: Sunday at lunchtime I ran into the first of the people who didn't know I was drafting her for a meeting; she said she would be happy to come, and we set a time. Then she said she had been looking for me. I hadn't spoken with her since last year at Gathering, when she and I had taken a workshop on "Quaker Quest", a very cleverly designed outreach program that took off like gangbusters in the UK and had just begun being tried in North America. Well, I must have made an impression in the workshop, because (as FGC staff responsible for the North American version of the program) she wanted to invite me to become a traveling presenter. On approximately four weekends of my choice over the next year. And FGC has a large grant to pay all expenses.

Egads. I told her it sounded tough, but quite a bit like something I could do. And I would consider it. And at this point I'm mostly sure I want to; it feels like a very clear response to my emphatic frustration with Canadian Quakerism. Or, a step on a path.

On Thursday, the 9 of us in the ad-hoc committee met, and we went away with lots of information and part of a plan that's broader than I expected. Then I had to present these findings to the Queer Quaker's Business Meeting on Friday.

Friday morning, I woke up with a pounding headache, before 6am, after about 6 hours of sleep. I felt totally drained and unprepared; I really wanted to sleep another hour. Unusually for me, I actually thought words at God/Spirit/whatever. I was fairly pissed. I said something like, "This isn't fair. I can't do this, I need some help here." And I got the clear reply to get up. So I did, and showered, and went to breakfast. And outside breakfast, I ran into one of the 9, talking with the co-clerk of our Business Meeting. And I went in to breakfast with our co-clerk, who turned out to be exactly the person I needed to talk to about structuring the presentation.

And I presented it Friday afternoon on behalf of the committee, and it was approved, and that felt awesome.

What else? Hm. I managed to get some singing in; I happened across two concerts led by Annie Patterson, co-creator of the Rise Up Singing songbook.

At the Queer Quaker Cabaret on Friday night, I did manage to see peaceofpie sing the song he wrote that very morning, and I would've been quite annoyed with myself if I'd missed it.

In Meeting for Worship, I had a very strong image of myself at half my current life, age 17, looking at me and being totally blown away that I'd get there. And having a strong sense of gratitude for the weird path life has taken.

The M&Ms. This is utterly trivial, but: have you ever had a mono-colour M&M experience? At an evening social, I was chatting with somebody and grabbed a handful of M&Ms. I looked and said, "Huh, 1/3 of them are yellow." The other person said that never happened to her. And none of the ones in her hand were yellow. So we kept talking and munching, and I looked down, and all but two of the remaining M&Ms were yellow. That used to happen fairly often for me, but then, I ate a lot of M&Ms back in high-school, so lots of chances for it to happen.

I had the chance to make many, many mistakes. Others affected by them were extremely graceful, whether or not they or I pointed the mistakes out. And I think I learned a great amount, and I think some of it will stick until the next time I have the choice to make the same mistake again, or not. And I helped a few people learn things as well, which felt great.

Other elements to the week: way too many people in a dining hall at dinner-time. Thoughtless people who didn't realize or didn't care. Thoughtful people doing kind things just because. Missing my sweetie. Not missing my email. Running through downpours. Wonderful togetherness-time with dear friends, some who are reading this right now.

Well, probably later, since right now it's a great time to be in bed. 'night!