elainegrey

My one act today to support everyday Iranians was to see if Ushahidi.com had anything going. It is being designed in the face of troubles in African news gathering but was used in reaction to the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. It's a combination of crisis response and citizen journalism, but there's no clear availability of the tool for bloggers and journalists.

I am now backed up beyond back, synced beyond sync, with crochet and reading and water and cheese and veggie nibbles for the plane. I'm a little irked i'm going two timezones away. I think my Texas geography confusion comes from driving to Los Alamos, NM (from Orlando, FL) through El Paso one year and through San Antonio another and somehow co-locating them.

I do wonder at my sense of transformation, a (guilt?) sense i should be morning writing "better" than i am (more introspection, more regularly). I wonder about balance -- social media connections have boomed with Facebook, yet LJ still seems quiet. Re LJ: is it summer? Westwardho doesn't see much movement at DreamWidth (i am basically double posting at both LJ & DW with LJ as most complete repository). I recognize my cycle in the year and honor that maybe outward is OK right now.

I read The Artists Way chapter on ... Integrity? ... last night, where Cameron asserts that we drop the morning pages because we're afraid of painful revelations. I think i can point to evidence that i have pursued writing through painful revelation, but i do get caught up in a loop of self doubt. I don't think i can afford those loops, and i'll choose to be confident in my sense.

Care Check-In
Have i been using those tools that i know make my life better? (Or that i'm experimenting with?)

Not exactly, as i've not been doing the little bits of question and response check in since ( for this) April 3. I haven't exactly set goals for the summer. Reading others' posts about their goals and progress is a little discomforting. I'm not sure why i haven't set my rough outline of goals in place, except to romanticize or rationalize it as a willingness to let go and let That Which Is transform me. Flow. And i quickly have layers of thought of, "Yes! You've spent so much time training and directing yourself, now let training react to the chaos of or reality and shift and adjust at the moment, trust the momentum that you've built up to stay on the right path!" and "You should be strictly following some system to Get Things Done -- my god, woman, right this moment do you realize how much you are failing to meet commitments and expectations!?!!"

Typing that voice out really lets me see it as the anxious, fearful, fail-ful voice it is.
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My mind is in a place where i'm constantly criticizing myself. I'm not going to give those thoughts the benefit of being written out. The thoughts come like a storm and i'll deal with them next weekend if they're still like this. I'm theorizing that i'm "sick," whatever is with the eyelid areas puffing up is causing larger system reactions, and that plus recovery time for the conferences is causing poor cognitive behavior.

Logged.

I am trying to respond to correspondence this morning. One was a message from the meeting in the city asking for updates for the directory, with "Please let us know how you are
doing? What is feeding your spiritual life these days?"

I don't feel empty right now, but i don't feel aware either. It occurs to me: in March i offered myself as willing to be transformed, trusting, not dictating or guiding or mapping out a final goal. This is not "rational" but suits my willingness to be an experimental subject. I offer myself for transformation, does change happen? There is a sense in which i feel i am incredibly mutable, in which i wish a little for stability, and then i laugh and think that externally i must appear immovable. I wish for another term: glacial speed used to seem appropriate, but glaciers move faster than i now. How will i know if change happens due to my offer compared to just the usual shifts and changes? Ah, poorly designed experiment, this.

Still, there's the detached sense i have right now, a bit as if i've loosened all control, and there does seem to be shifts happening, not so much as if i was disconnected and dissociated from the changes, but too close, too folded and shifted, too disoriented. Will i look back this fall, next March and go, a-ha? What does dough know on the way to bread, the slip on its way to glaze, the ore in the crucible? Offering up myself for transformation, i know i stretch and change, i feel frustrated with my energy levels, but i create and correspond and act as much if not more than before.

I've not spent much time with the meditation on the clay oven, feeding the fire, watching bread bake, and stew cook. Being consumed, being transformed: it feels even less controlled than my opening myself to the variety of rhythms in flow, while it seems it should be more goal oriented. There's a waiting thats not there with the movement in flow: stir the pot, feed the fire, repeat, repeat, change is constantly occurring while nothing changes.


respond: ORIGIN late Middle English (in the noun senses): from Old French, from respondre ‘to answer,’ from Latin respondere, from re- ‘again’ + spondere ‘to pledge.’ The verb dates from the mid 16th cent.

correspond: ORIGIN late Middle English : from Old French correspondre, from medieval Latin correspondere, from cor- ‘together’ + Latin respondere (see respond ).

Mr M is so much better, be purrs and purrs and purrs. I realize just how much his deep bass rumble is a tonic for me, much like my Beloved Listener, Christine. Hooray, hooray for antibiotics!

Christine was a tonic for me last night. During the women's reading group, a woman whose project and self has been the center of a good deal of meeting controversy vented her pain. It was a tricky thing to do: stay emotionally open to be with her pain but not take it or own it, listen to her woundedness that is so clearly there beyond the Meeting relationship, point out a few misconceptions and miseducations. The biggest miseducation is that she had to "go through a committee" which meant she just left all the details of her relationship with the Meeting to her committee. At one point she had apparently done something and was told she had to go through committee. Surely there was some subtlety she has missed (perhaps she wanted a minute acted upon or a meeting of some sort scheduled), as she took that to mean do nothing but go through committee. Her committee erred too, i think, in telling her to stay away from Meetings for Business. So many other people wondered why she was not there. For me, it drives home that no matter what the process, what the structure: it's all just people underneath, and it is the direct relationships that matter.

I so suck at direct relationships.

At least, that's what i automatically think. I was raised to believe that about myself. That too sucks. It compounds my native shyness and introversion and sensitivity

It is a good lesson, that it is direct relationships that matter, as it is too easy to abstract away the details of others and generalize into error.

I'm going to be on Oversight committee beginning this fall, for the next three years. It is a role of ministry, caring for the joys and the wounds of individuals and the tricky abstraction of the Meeting as a Whole.

I've lost a little sense of the fire energy i had been focussing on last year, and my commitment to offer myself up to that for transformation. But as think about this role, and i think about my sense of receptive vitality, what i think i need to do is learn to be as open to joys as to pain and anger.

Last night's tiny bit of attention paid to The Artist's Way was a moment of responding to the prompt "Creatives are." I don't think i have deep blocks on my creativity these days based on my perceptions of creative people as other, different from myself. I've learned to cherish creativity even in relating to management. But one of the things that came out in the exercise was the sense of the joyful, bright butterfly of creativity and my slightly resentful sense that i'm not that.

I know i was on some level reacting to tenacious_snail's vibrant palette and creative decoration plans -- mostly the vibrant palette. Our home is mostly decorated in natural tones and desaturated colors, although some artwork stands out with bright colors. My wardrobe is more muted tones, although once upon a time it was swirly cotton skirts and thrift store silk shirts in bright colors.

I think i'll wear my red silk shirt today and the red and gold necklace. I'm *not* really living in just muted tones, but something about surviving over the years of graduate school, the depression, and then getting our household on stable ground (my profession, Christine's transition and finding a community for herself) had taken so much.

I think i'm ready for joy, i've just forgotten how to live it.