Finding community and friendship

I made $.70 from my very first article on Medium so far which is a whole lot better than I expected. People tend to say it takes writing a whole bunch of articles to be happy with what you’ve made so I’m cool with that.

I have not been in my usual rhythm at all. I really want to do the same things I’ve been doing but I have no motivation to get started. I can’t concentrate on one thing for very long. Once I get started I want to move onto something else. Today I am so wiped out and sad. It is a more complex feeling than that, a sadness tinged with curiosity about what exactly I am feeling, and with hope, but it is an emotional exhaustion that kind of feels like being run over. There is a part of me that feels like trauma is beginning to heal somehow though I am still really scared that I won’t be able to handle what comes. Meditation the last few days has been good for me. I am able to settle down and get into my body in ways that I really didn’t feel at all capable of a couple months ago. I had all sorts of weird thoughts and random voices going through my head today. It is nice to just observe this weird stuff in meditation, I feel like it means my brain is full of this stuff anyway and this is a way to clean it out. I feel a whole lot clearer after tonight’s meditation.

I didn’t sleep at all last night and emotions around my dog just rose up in me and I had to vent them to my mother which was really difficult and painful. She said she spent all day thinking about whatnI said, actually, which I hope is a good thing.

Then I got up and talked with my host for more than an hour in the early morning. We talked about statistics and binomial distributions and pranks he played at MIT. All sorts of things, I don’t even remember. Right now I can’t remember much of anything. It really helped me feel better this morning though and then we went to Meeting which was really nice and I was able to get into a deeper meditation during Meeting than I have experienced there.

I feel strange, I can’t pinpoint it. I was feeling really grateful today that it is like I have found a community of folks who really are friends. The Society of Friends (Quakers) is more than just a name, it’s really a group of people who are with each other as friends, as my host pointed out today, and it is a group of people my heart feels relaxed and settled with, though I remember when I first discovered Quakers I was kind of intimidated, simply because I didn’t know anybody and everyone probably had more experience with Quakerism than me and… yeah.

Today I just felt so un-self conscious and I feel a sense that I am growing in familiarity with everyone as they are with me. They are helping me to not be scared of other people, to feel more natural and myself in social settings, though it used to be that I felt especially awkward at Quaker meetings. I feel a comforting sense of community and kinship and even belonging not only with this group of people but just knowing that Quakers are gathered here and there in meetinghouses of all shapes and colours all over the world gives me a great sense of comfort. I do not feel hopelessly on the outside, I feel I can communicate naturally, and be myself, though I am still really quiet at potluck. I feel accepted and that is a good feeling.

The sense of acceptance carries over to a sense of affinity with Quaker meetings around the world. I have only been to two other meetings before, one in Providence, Rhode Island, and one in Cork City, Ireland 🇮🇪 , where I lived for a little bit (and by the way, my host tells me his family on his mother’s side comes from County Cork). The one in Rhode Island was at the end of a young adult retreat I went on and I felt so anxious at the end of it for some reason left early. In Ireland one member spoke and said something about the potato famine. So I have been to several Quaker retreats but until this past summer I had only been to a handful of meetings. Now I am just beginning to have the experience of what it’s like to feel like part of a meeting and I am so grateful for that. It has been a long time coming but I am finally starting to feel at ease in the presence of others again and the love I have felt at meeting is changing me though I don’t know how yet. I am appreciating meetings more and more, finding more and more beauty in the process of just sitting and gathering in silence every Sunday morning, where people speak only as spirit calls them.

Today a number of Friends spoke and there was a lot of pain and despair expressed about what is going on in Gaza. Every meeting has a different quality as it is made up of unique people and spirits but I feel like, maybe not everywhere, but I could travel around to meetings in different towns and feel a sense of some kind of belonging and social at easeness with myself pretty much anywhere I go. At least in unprogrammed, liberal Quaker meetings. I don’t really know anything about what programmed and evangelical meetings are like but I think I would feel out of place at meetings with an agenda. I don’t think meeting would feel like meeting if there were a pastor or minister but some meetings have one and it is strange: what I love about the Quaker meetings I know is that there is no leader, per se, and no programming or explicit liturgy (though there is a fascinating idea of the liturgy of silence itself), so I am not sure if other types of meetings would even feel Quaker to me, but unprogrammed Friends General Conference meetings do feel more and more like home and I feel like I will feel a sense of connection to Quakers in pretty much every meeting I attend.

I love the simplicity of it, the sense of peace I get and the increasing sense of connection I feel just sitting in silence with others every week. I have a tendency to want to make a lot of things happen fast and Quaker process is very slow but it helps me stop and smell the roses.

I was very happy to hear today that the quarterly meeting (group of meetings that gets together to share worship every three months) has a fund to help people in financial need, whether they need help paying first and last month deposit on a place to live or help with the doen payment for a car. Even better, someone is thinking: it is a fund that accumulates interest. I don’t know whether someone put down a large sum of money so that most needs can be met through interest rather than principle but for me that is the ideal. I think it is so important for communities to have something like that, so, so important, and I’m glad it exists. Of course I’m not really sure how people find out about it and I am sure people who may need it never find out it exists. The lack of such a fund is one of my major sources of frustration with community as I have experienced it. For community to be community, if there exist more relatively well-off folks in the community, someone needs to have the back of the poor and marginalized and people going through rough times.

This speaks also to what I consider a sort of concern that I have about how Quakers are doing a lot of different good things but most people do not hear about the vast majority of things going on because there is maybe a kind of an inefficient way of holding collective wisdom. If a meeting is doing something of concern and interest to other meetings I think there should be some kind of network or easy way for people to find out about these things. I was kind of thinking, I don’t want to live in a town without a Quaker meeting. This is a small meeting in the city but I am sure there are larger meetings out in the country and I kind if wish I was part of some of these more rural meetings. I feel like being a part of a meeting tethers me to something really grounding and nourishing.

I love the openness of Quakerism, how all are really welcome at meetings and whether you have gone through the process of officially becoming an ‘convinced’ Quaker or not you are still welcome. I think I do want to go through that process. I like that it’s okay to have faith, it’s okay not to have faith, it’s okay to be wherever you are on a spiritual journey, it’s okay to believe in Jesus, and okay to be uncomfortable with Jesus (though evangelical Friends are definitely more focused on Jesus). Honestly in the meeting I attend I don’t know if I have heard anyone even mention Jesus. But if Jesus is a big part of your path that’s okay too. I love that it is a very open contemplative tradition and that sitting with questions, called queries, is a big part of Quaker practice. Questions, not dogma and spoon-fed answers. What else? I love that worship sharing is actually sharing your reflections snd the fruits of contemplation with others. That to me is friendship. It’s what I hope I do here… at least sometimes, anyway.