What binds me to Meeting?

First, I want to acknowledge that it has been almost a year since I posted, and there is a lot that happened to cause that. I was involved in something larger than myself that took up a lot of my bandwidth, and in the end I spiraled into a depression. For a while, my only way forward was to focus on the task at hand. I am not finished with that work, but the question above has prompted me to think on it at least a little every day since it was asked.

My very first thought when I read that question on Saturday when I got the email about our monthly meeting for business was, loyalty and a fear that I won’t find anywhere else I “belong.” Not a good start.

It has been almost a year since I made bricks for my labyrinth. I make the excuse that I don’t really need to, the moss is nowhere near grown in. I make the case to myself that in the end it just isn’t worth the time or the energy. It is expensive and time consuming and…

But none of that is the truth, I stopped making bricks because the community I was building with the breaking of the China had become painful. People I had allowed into my community had started damaging me. I didn’t want to continue my labyrinth without them, but I also needed to wade through all the work that was resulting in my damage.

So here is the short version, in a matter of months I had these things happen;

• As clerk I had to address an incident of racial bias in the Meeting
• I had a child going off to college
• I had a second child investigating some repressed childhood trauma that was rearing its head
• I had a colleague who could not do her job and it fell to me to take that on
• I had to face interrogation by members of Meeting about why I was handling the incident of racial bias the way I was handling it
• I had to deal with a co-clerk with whom I though I had built communion and trust basically throw me under the bus and stab me in the back
• I had to listen to a group of colleague who wanted a lot of changes demand that things change while offering to do NOTHING
• I had nearly nightly conversations with people who had very strong opinions on what was happening in Meeting
• I had hours of conversation with someone who refused to do the inner work of acknowledging their own racism
• I had hours of conversation with someone who refused to acknowledge that their trauma was NOT everyone’s trauma and they allowed their trauma to dominate how they treated those around them
• I had a lot of people tell me all the things I was doing wrong
• I had to complete my promotion package to senior lecturer
• I had to prepare files and work for our national accreditation board for two of my classes
• I had to deal with yet another semester of COVID accommodations and student excuses
• My partner and son got COVID and threw all of our holiday and travel plans into chaos
• My oldest son hated the college he was attending and decided to transfer to the school his girlfriend was attending after 1 semester
• A million other small things that seem small to others, but were not so small to me…including having to face some of my own repressed trauma and my own inner work on my racial bias (neither of which are easy)

Looking back, I think I held it together remarkably well. But I don’t write that as a way to pat myself on the back, I write that because on September 21, 2021 I wrote my resignation letter as clerk of Meeting (I didn’t send it). My resignation letter basically says, that I cannot continue on in the role of clerk because I feel like I am losing my connection to Meeting.

All the things that bound me to Meeting prior to my time as clerk (shared values, desire for honest community, striving for equity) no longer felt real. The Meeting was fracturing and the stress was real, everyone had an opinion, and only a few of us carried the responsibility. I needed help.

Some gave what they could and I still feel very bound to them, but I am struggling with trust. I don’t trust a number of people in Meeting any longer. I don’t believe in their willingness to do the hard work or provide adequate support to those doing the hard work. People I believed I would trust with my life, I no longer feel that for.

So…what binds me to Meeting? Those few points of Light. Those few souls that I know deeply share my values, whom I value deeply and who value me. I am bound by a desire to hold on to those points of light and hopefully find others as we grow from this experience.

I am bound to Meeting by nothing more than my choice to embrace those points of light rather than let go and walk toward a different point of light.

With that recognition and understanding, I will move forward with the labor on my labyrinth because those points of light are a part of that community as well.