November, and everything after...

Erm, happy new year! Chinese new year that is.... So yes, it's been a while and I still haven't sent out my Christmas epistle to all those who usually get it. I've been even more late than usual this season.

Why? Well basically November happened, and then December... For me, like most people I know, the major political event of November 2016 was pretty galling, but I was already in a state of altered reality and discombobulation. Nothing to do with Brexit (although that too has added to the general feeling that somehow we seem to be living in Discworld where parody has overtaken reality), but a day after her 90th birthday Phyllis took ill. Three days of scaring the living daylights out of me with her rapid decline led to hospitalization, treatment, further decline and the prospect of losing her loomed large.

Having reached the point where the Doctors were saying 'you do realize this is end of life care don't you, we're just making her comfortable for her last days, perhaps weeks' everyone started turning up to say goodbye to Grandma. She was ready to go, prayed to go in fact, but whoever was listening decided that there were other plans afoot and instead she started to get better.

It has been a slow, but steady improvement. And after a transfer back to the local hospital for rehab and now the local rest home for more of the same, she's literally back on her feet again if a tad unsteady at times. Not back to how she was (remarkably well for 90!), but there's time yet and currently the issue is reminding her how sick she was so don't over do things!

So I'm now rather well acquainted with the local hospital staff and routines, Joanne and I could probably get a pretty good reference if we wanted to be auxiliaries and we've learned more than we ever wanted to about a whole heap of things to do with the personal care of an incapacitated person. We've also learned how desperately understaffed our hospitals are and that the prospects are slim for anyone who needs that level of care who doesn't have family and friends to be at the bedside almost 24hrs a day coaxing food and drink down in minute but regular quantities, who help can adjust positioning the moment discomfort is felt, who can assist a nurse rather than them have to wait until two of them are free to change dressings and pads, toilet, shower etc.

Gradually life is now slipping into a 'new normal' and feels somewhat more connected to the outside world rather than being in some strange bubble. In fact I have been blogging for a couple of weeks, but that was setting up Marion's blog for her recipes etc. Basically she doesn't have time to get things publishable, so it's a team effort where she drafts stuff and I post it. After her and Mandy rescuing the gluten free and/or non-meat eating Summer Gatherers from the results of miscommunication and understandings and whipping up some fabulous food with the kitchen staff her recipes are in even more demand than ever! So now I just need to get my own blog back on track again, oh and get Docs in Advance ready for the printer, and the last bit of the new EcoCentre website drafted, and..... hmmm, anyone got a timeturner I could borrow?

to have and have not

A f/Friend shared this article on Facebook earlier this week. In it a piece written by a medical student who had experimented with living on $3.30 a day for 200 days is critiqued. His argument was that as he had thrived on this it shows how all the other factors of poverty must have a bigger effect on health outcomes than poor diet.

His argument sounds fairly reasonable until you factor in that he had weekends 'off', and stuck it out for 200 days out of +20yrs. Real poverty doesn't take weekends off, and the health impacts are generally due to accumulation over years not 200 days, unless one is only 200 days old. Anyway, the other article says lots of this better than I can.

I've lived on or below the official poverty line for a hefty chunk of my life. However I come from a middle class background where there has been enough money to house us well throughout my childhood no matter how low our family income might have been at times. Whenever I've found myself facing homelessness (3 times!) I've had friends with good incomes who have provided me with a home. I've lived off a very low disposable income since coming to Aotearoa NZ but there has always been someone else paying the bulk of the bills. Yes I have eating healthily off a low income down pat which proves it can be done, but I have the cashflow ability to buy in bulk, I never have to sacrifice buying food to replace a broken washing machine, buy school shoes, or fix a car. Also the only times in life that I've been turned down for jobs through prejudice has been when I was considered 'over qualified', rather than from having the wrong address, skin colour etc. Yes I know what it is like to have too much month at the end of the money, and have lived off frozen spinach, tinned tomatoes and bread from the half price bakery for several weeks waiting for the next grant cheque, but I've never actually gone hungry.

I think for some people doing the living off $3 a day or whatever experiment is quite an eye-opener and can teach them a very different perspective on life they might otherwise have been oblivious to. But they are usually still doing that in the comfort of their own home, with their bills paid, a job to go to etc etc etc. To really 'get it' you need to factor in more than just one aspect of your day. I'm always impressed though with the will power of those who've done the living off x amount a day, or refugee rations for a week/month in aid of Oxfam etc to raise awareness/funds. It's not something I ever intend to try given my health, and it would take a lot of planning not to end up with other food in the house/garden going to waste because you weren't eating anything but the rations etc, which does seem rather pointless. After all I'm pretty sure those for whom it is a daily reality wouldn't appreciate perfectly good food being wasted on their behalf. 

The difference between living in poverty and living below the poverty line can be huge and I am grateful for the skills I've learned as a result of the latter, and the fact that I've had the privilege in life not to fall into the former. Being part of inter-generational poverty, growing up with poor nutrition through lack of funds and/or education, living off cheap takeaways as there isn't enough money for power bills this month is the reality for some. Living in poverty is often more expensive than simply being poor, you can't take advantage of supermarket specials as you have no spare cash to buy anything not desperately needed this week, you end up paying far more for power etc to get the fixed installments so you can budget (or worse have to have pay a $500 bond to get those fixed installments! I was horrified to discover this when sorting out our neighbours affairs earlier this year) and so the list goes on. So yes providing good healthy food for the children of these families will go a long way to improving their outcome, no matter how cheaply someone else in better circumstances can feed themselves. There has recently been a swell of enthusiasm locally to get some fruit trees planted around town on public land and I really hope we can make it happen to improve access to free healthy kai here as there are plenty who need it. Now we just have to kick up a noisy fuss about the new food regulations which are making it difficult for small scale growers who sell off their surplus at the market to help make ends meet... there's always something to make life harder when you're struggling already.

a story of life

Well after 5 years and almost 4 months the last of my stuff made it's way from Pukepoto to Kaitaia. I now have my captain's chair in my room, and additionally I now have a new (to me) cabinet that has a drop down cupboard door that acts as a desk. So now when I'm working from home I'm no longer either sitting on my bed or the sofa with my laptop on one of those bed trays that one of Phyllis' sons made for a school project around 50 years ago! Not that I have any plans to relinquish the tray, it's still going to be very handy, but ergonomically it isn't a cunning plan for lengthy use.

It was a bit strange really to bring away that last bit of my stuff, I lived there for four years and a month - so less time than I've been here, yet somehow it feels like it was way longer. Probably as so many big changes went on in my life there. I went from being on a visitor visa, to a student one, to a working towards full registration one, to permanent residency. I bumped into someone I used to see quite often in the years I was living at Pukepoto in the Post Office yesterday, he was posting off new passports for visa stickers to be added and we commiserated over the hold and amount of funds the Immigration has (had for me now!) over our lives. Marking the passage of time by what visa I have held seems perfectly normal. Not that the last five years have been 'samey', I got my citizenship and Kiwi passport whilst living here after all!

I put this photo of the chair and 'desk' on Facebook earlier, quickly downloaded off the camera, with no edits. When I came to put it on here I was about to crop it down, then really took note as to what was around the edges; my 'Triennial mug' on the shelf behind the glass door which has been used for pens etc for probably as many years now as it was used as a mug; my rather faded Guatemalan patchwork bedspread bought in Flores the one time I got to go to visit one of our overseas projects when I worked for an international development charity; my old purple dressing gown which apart from being wonderfully warm and snuggley is a reminder of the importance of being able to wear what you choose (long story...); and the first patchwork quilt I ever made... my first ever patchwork project is the photo too - the cushion cover on the chair was made from a Liberty patchwork kit I got when I was about 11 or 12, it got completed about 10yrs later! So a snapshot not only of the present, but of many chunks of my past, and the journey that led to me being here with them, and once I'd thought about them that way I couldn't bring myself to crop them out.

All too often details round the edges get cut off to improve the aesthetics of a picture, but they can provide a supporting narrative which is easily lost. What to cut out and what to keep.... the decluttering dilemma in a nutshell! As a (very part time) genealogist the idea of keeping things for posterity that tells the story of a people has a huge pull, and very much shaped my hoarding years. But I've learned to let go of 'stuff'; photos of everyday life can tell a lot of a story, without having to keep boxes and boxes of stuff to prove it happened, although I'll certainly be hanging on to my multi-stickered passport for a few years yet! So I'm going to try to remember that when editing photos, sometimes historical value is more important than art! Now if only I could manage to combine the two more effectively...

Plastic Free July and all that

Whoa, where did August get to? I started this at the beginning of the month and figured I'd best get it finished before September got here!

Whilst this is the 3rd year I've done the Plastic Free July challenge, it is the first time I've known others doing it. I put posters up about it at the EcoCentre last year, but whilst various folk commented on it to me and said it was a good idea no-one said they would give it a go. However it turns out that several of them did, and this year they were willing to push it further within our local community.

Three times in July we've had stalls at the market, along with a bottle buy-back scheme with a grant from the Far North District Council where folk could get 10c refund for every clean, lidless, number 1 plastic (PET) bottle they brought along. We had $500 to give away, but it has taken all three market days plus some additional time at the EcoCentre to work through less than half of it. It takes time to bring about a change in people's habits, and whilst every weekend in July would've been better in terms of promoting the scheme it would've been much harder on our volunteers, especially as the first Saturday in July was a very cold and frosty morning! (yes, frosty. In Kaitaia, the so-called 'Winterless North'!). Momentum is building for a national container deposit scheme like they have in South Australia, so there is hope of bringing about change and getting more plastic, glass and aluminium recycled. But it would be better still if we didn't use so much plastic in the first place. We've had another 'buy-back' earlier this month and have got one last push this Saturday where we hope to hand out the rest

I was working at the EcoCentre the other day when a woman came in assuming we were the i-Site (Tourist Information Centre), this is far from unusual as they used to be in the building we use, but shifted almost 4yrs ago into Te Ahu when it was opened. But rather than head straight back out when I pointed her in the right direction to find them (all of 100m away, if that) she asked So what is this place then? I saw your 'say no to single use plastic' sign, it's something I know I need to do more about, but don't know where to start. Well about half an hour later she headed off with lots to think about and some ideas to bring about change in the flat she shares in Auckland. Like many people she knows the theory of what to do, but gets stuck on the practice. Habits, as I said, take time to change. I have always found it easiest to change one thing at a time, and once it becomes normal practice and you don't have to think about it any more then add in something new.

For me a simple step was always carry around with me a cloth shopping bag. I've added to that more recently by also having a wee pouch with some cotton bags that I get flour, grains etc in from the bulk bins at the health food shop, and some net bags for produce, or larger bulk bin items like nuts that are big enough not to work their way out of the mesh. They are always there, like my purse, my keys and (usually!) my phone. That way I don't have to think about it when I go shopping, and if I want to impulse shop after (or even at) work I don't find myself caught short needing to use plastic bags.

One of the questions our visitor asked was about plastic bin liners, how do you manage without them? Well in our kitchen we do use a plastic carrier bag as a bin liner, but we empty that into the rubbish sack in the garage and re-use the bag until it gets too torn. It doesn't get very dirty as we rinse any food containers out before putting them in there, and we compost, and wash then recycle far more than we throw away. We could of course not use a liner and wash the bin out more often, or make newspaper liners, but that is a step yet to be taken in this household. I explained that I stopped having a bin in every room, if you have to walk to a different room to dispose of your rubbish it is mentally easier to ensure you put it in the recycling or compost rather than landfill. I was asked about sanitary towels etc, what did I do about those? Well having used a menstrual cup for years until no longer required that hadn't been problem for me, and I now use homemade washable pantiliners daily as what remains of my menstrual cycle is minimal but highly irregular. But between us we figured out that a pile of paper bags in the bathroom, or even old newspaper, would mean there was something to put sanitary towels in before taking them to a central bin.

Having someone else to problem-solve our dilemmas with is why forums such as the Plastic Free July Facebook page come in to their own, even better are local support groups. That is why we held a 'Plastic Free Lunch' at the end of July at the EcoCentre. Those who could/remembered brought along their 'dilemma bags' the single use plastic they hadn't managed to avoid and it was interesting even with a relatively small sample how much difference there was in content. Having a group together meant we solved a couple of 'where can you buy ...... in a non-plastic container?' queries, and we came up with a way to repurpose something which was actioned as soon as we tidied up. But the discussion, and my reflections on looking at what was in the JYF Camp 'dilemma bag', brought up the question as to when certain packaging had changed. Having swapped countries and moved from cities to a small town it's hard for me to say on some things, especially ones I don't generally shop for. In Wellington you could get loo roll wrapped in paper, but shipped over from Australia, whereas the Kiwi made stuff was in plastic..., up here I've generally not been the one shopping for it so couldn't say when paper wrapped loo roll ceased to be available. Same with cheese, I don't know when it ceased to be available cut off the block and only came shrink wrapped up here as it isn't something I eat let alone buy. I'm guessing thought that such availability locally predates my arrival in the country. Someone is going to ask our local butcher if they'll let them use their own containers for meat, not much help to me, but good for the community in general if they will. The lunch itself was delivered plastic free, the soup arrived in the pan it had been cooked in (and then reheated on our woodstove! Oh how wonderfully warm it gets in there now), the bread bought from the market came in a paper bag, and the home made flapjack arrived in a tin. It's making the small habitual steps like using a tin rather than a plate with clingfilm/glad wrap/saran wrap over it that can build up and shift your use of plastic without it being a major upheaval in life.

When I was at JYF Camp one of the other leaders said how he struggled to understand people getting rid of perfectly good plastic things that still had life in them, and he saw that as creating more waste not less and he couldn't see the point. Well yes if they are throwing those things out it is counterproductive, but mostly they get rehomed/recycled. I've been slowly swapping my assorted plastic kitchen containers for glass or ceramic ones, as I've found the less plastic I have the easier it is to be strong willed not to let new plastic in to the house. In clearing out a neighbour's kitchen recently I had the opportunity to have first pick of the stuff she had, and several things I put to one side only to return them to the 'getting rid of' boxes as they were plastic. They were all 'it would be nice to have...' items rather than essentials, so I could wait until I found a metal/glass/wooden one etc. There was of course also the 'yes it would be nice to have but where the heck would I put it?' factor. Whilst we've cleared a lot of stuff out over the years I've been living here there is still a distinct lack of spare space in the house, mainly due to having gained two part time residents!

So with July over for this year we're now starting to plan ahead at the EcoCentre for next year, where is our 'plastic free' campaign going to take us next? All kinds of ideas are buzzing around, but like with implementing change in our own homes we need to do this at an incremental level that is sustainable, we want to bring people with us on this journey, not scare them off.

All welcome?

We don't have many Meeting Houses in this country (eight according to our Yearly Meeting Documents in Advance), and I've not yet been to them all, but I'm reasonably sure all of them say 'All welcome' on their signs outside.

Yet I heard in the last week of someone who had grown up part of the Quaker whānau going Meeting recently and when being asked what he was doing these days basically got told 'you can't do that and be a Quaker'.

I remember some years back discovering that the only Quaker MP sitting in Westminster at the time was a member of the Conservative party. Not the most common political party of choice in the UK amongst Friends, but he wasn't asked to leave or be quiet about being a Quaker. I accepted that even though I might not agree with his politics, and wondered how on earth he balanced his political and religious beliefs, that he was entitled to them, and after all when asking George Fox about wearing a sword William Penn was told to 'wear it as long as thou canst'. In other words your conscience, that still small voice, that of god in you, will let you know when you can no longer maintain seemingly opposing stances and you will know which you have to follow.

If someone comes to one of our Meetings apparently holding values different to those commonly accepted by Quakers what is more likely to bring them round to our way of thinking; being told they can't do/be/believe something and be a Quaker, or being made to feel welcome? A better response would have been 'well you don't find many of those amongst Friends, but I'm glad you still felt that you could come to Meeting' or 'that's an interesting choice, what led you to choose that?' If we want people to reconsider their actions then surely in the quiet of Meeting and in the heart of our community is the best place for them to do so, and it is less likely to happen if they are made to feel unwelcome and unwanted. It can take a lot of courage and psyching yourself up to attend Meeting when you know that what you do is likely to be considered unpopular; to still go anyway because you need that space to worship among Friends is not a decision that will have been taken lightly. To answer honestly when asked 'what are you doing these days?' rather than give an effacing answer that will be more palatable takes courage and integrity.

It isn't a situation that only those with occupations generally perceived to be 'unquakerly' who experience this kind of response when they come to Meeting. I've regularly come across Young Friends who when making it to Meeting for Worship for the first time in ages are basically harangued for not coming more often and expected to explain the absence of others of their peer group. Do we expect any other age group to have to explain themselves if they erratically attend, and vouch for their peer group who they may not have seen in months, maybe even years? And then Friends wonder why our Young Friends don't come to Meeting more often.

If we're going to have signs up saying 'All Welcome' then we need to mean it and live it.

reconnected

After nine weeks we've finally got the phone and internet reconnected at the EcoCentre. It got disconnected in error by some other teleco inputting some code telling ours they were taking over the account when they weren't. It has been something of a nightmare to get sorted  - thankfully not by me after my experiences of having to do the same at home when it happened to us last year. Luckily ours got reconnected the same day; having an emergency call alarm running via the phone no doubt bumping us up the priority list.

Anyway the upshot of being offline at the EcoCentre has meant I've been doing all the emails for the EcoCentre and Kaitaia TimeBank plus maintaining both Facebook pages from home instead of during my hours at the EcoCentre, so my blog has been somewhat neglected of late. There's only so much time I can spend at a computer in one day and not get a stonking headache, even with my new progressive/varifocal glasses.

Putting in the extra hours has pushed me over my energy limits somewhat, especially as the weeks have included two weekends away from home doing Quaker things: our MM residential gathering in Kerikeri, and a weekend in Auckland attending a seminar on Eldership as well as taking part in various 3rd Sunday activities. It was well worth going to both though, as much to connect with people in 'real life' rather than via skype (my usual mode of attending MM) and other online means (how our Outreach Committee functions). However my 'fibro brain' has meant my forgettery has been working overtime and no matter how many reminders I've left myself in various places I've managed to miss the Online Meeting for Worship at Woodbrooke for the last few weeks (It's at 9.30am Weds and 1pm Fridays UK time - I try to get to the Weds one, the other being at midnight for us!). However I now have google calendar set up with a pop-up reminder ten minutes before it starts so at least if I'm on the computer already I've a hope of catching it from now on! Another way to connect with people, albeit remotely via the internet.

I'm looking forward to life resuming some sense of 'normality' again, and being able to feel like I'm keeping up with the world. I might even get past the end of January with the uploading of my photos on to Flickr before the end of this month, I've finished getting Summer Gathering on there and have almost got to the final leg of the journey home!

Now, I'd best go and have lunch before my afternoon shift at the EcoCentre starts, I'm quite looking forward to being able to get all those bits of paperwork that I need to print off for our annual accounts. Never thought I'd ever hear myself say that, it's amazing what a lack of connectivity can do to change ones perspective on life!

How do I show up to serve?

Between my work at the EcoCentre and being on our MM Outreach Committee (Quakers) I've been rapidly coming to the conclusion in recent weeks that I need to do some serious upskilling in the field of online content and management. The idea of signing up for a year long course through the polytechnic felt more than a little bit daunting given I am still getting to grips with having upped my regular 'work' hours, paid and voluntary, so I decided to try some webinars as I really needed some input now rather than in a year or twos time when my health might be more conducive to study.

One was run by Tech Soup, a Kiwi organization that supports charities with technical services etc and was about website content - I had a meeting when it was broadcast so I've now got the recording and need to make time to go through it. The other was by Jill Winger, whose e-newsletter, blog and Facebook page The Prairie Homestead has become regular reading for me in recent years. She's been the inspiration for many of my ventures into Urban Homesteading even though she's rural based rather than urban. There's nothing like thinking that if a city girl gone bush can do it, so can I! Over the years she's become a professional blogger, as well as a homesteader, so she's now sharing her experience with other bloggers.

I'm not expecting to ever turn this blog into anything much more than it's current ramble through life, it's purpose has been primarily as a window into my life for whānau and f/Friends who are spread around the world; if others come across it and enjoy it then great, welcome on board, please excuse the mess.... But I've seen blogging be used as a great outreach tool, and I can see the potential for a blog being part of the revamped EcoCentre site when that happens (later this year funding applications willing...). And if the EcoCentre blog/website can help bring in some funds as well then that would be brilliant. So what had originally started off as idle curiosity some time back when Jill asked in one of her e-mailings if anyone would be interested in a webinar on blogging, suddenly became highly relevant and I was glad I'd put my hand up.

What really struck me in her webinar today were some of the questions she put out there as needing to be addressed when planning a blog:

Who am I?
Why do I want to blog?
What do I have to offer?
How do I show up to serve?
What is my message?
Who am I going to help?

As I hurriedly scrawled those down on the back of an envelope I thought they were pretty good life questions in general, let alone for blogging, even as a career! The last few years of my life have been a bit vague in those areas as I've transitioned from being an Early Childhood teacher, to someone who can barely stay awake all day, to someone doing a bit of this a bit of that and wondering where it is all heading... they would've been useful questions to have on hand sooner to help me focus on what I wanted to be doing.

As it happens things have been starting to crystallize and I'm quite happy with the way things are heading. I've had time to 'practice' being in the EcoCentre slowly picking up more and more of the admin and finance tasks. I've been quite clear about saying 'no' to tasks I haven't felt ready for, and those around me have known me when both well (relatively speaking!) and really sick, so if we ever do get the funding to pay me for the work I'm doing I know there won't be any unrealistic expectations and I'll have a supportive environment to work in (and even a warm one too this winter if we get resource consent for the woodstove!). Alongside that I'm enjoying the work putting together the Yearly Meeting documents (and yes it is much easier this year having done it before), and there might be other work of a similar ilk I can help the YM Clerk with.

Being realistic even if I had managed to get my head around those questions a year or so ago it would probably have been frustrating more than anything else as I wasn't up to doing much about it. So I guess as per usual the universe is unfolding as it should.

I hope as the years roll by I'll always be able to 'step out and take my dreams seriously' as Jill said, rather than listen to all the people who say take the safe conventional route. She's right in that the biggest hurdle is getting past the fear you'll fall on your face and they'll all say 'I told you so', but better to fall on your face having given it your best shot than never having tried. As I reminded a friend on Facebook recently who was being self-depreciating about her slow jog compared to other's rather more athletic approach to triathlon training, she's lapping everyone still sitting on the couch. She may come in last (but probably won't), but the most important thing is she's stepped up to the challenge. Especially as she wasn't a runner, cyclist nor swimmer before signing up!

I keep coming back to the question Jill threw in to the mix 'How do I show up to serve?' and a diagram the same triathlon heading friend shared on Facebook:



I'm not quite sure where I'd put myself on this diagram right now, but I'm aiming for the middle. Both how to get there and 'how do I show up' is one step at a time...

ponderings on Peru and possibilities

A big diversion for me this week is reading the many updates of f/Friends who have headed to Pisac in Peru for the World Plenary of FWCC. I did a quick tot up of names and got to at least 35 Friends there that I know, and there are no doubt many others that I just haven't discovered are there yet!

I was reading Rachel's blog post about the event and was struck by how similar the four consultations are to the four themes that have emerged in our Yearly Meeting's structure review so far. I commented on this in an email to the nine Friends from our YM heading there and got this reply from Elizabeth Duke "Your perception of the similarities between the themes being considered here and those in our YM is spot-on. I'm co-clerking the consultation on 'Equipping FWCC', along with Michael Eccles, and our planned movement through our four sessions owes more than a little to my experience on the YM working group." Part of me was surprised at the co-incidence, but the rest of me remembers reading a Quaker blog post (sorry I've long since forgotten who wrote it!) that spoke of god-incidences instead, and I figure that it makes perfect sense that a process of discernment as to why both FWCC and our YM exist comes up with similar answers!

It is exciting to think that the experience of those attending the World Plenary are going to be so timely for our ongoing discernment here. I came back from the 2012 World Conference of Friends in Kenya with a renewed enthusiasm for Outreach after the message of not hiding our light under a bushel came through loud and clear. There has indeed been a stirring of enthusiasm for outreach across the YM, but there has also been a distinct lack of direction. How do we reach out to those who may be looking for us if we don't really have a clear vision of who we are, and the structure we have clearly needs overhauled? 

So we've muddled along in the background with vague ideas but lacking content. In some ways it has felt like putting the cart before the horse, even more so seeing that the Handbook Revision Committee has been updating our equivalent of Church Government when the status quo is under review. However Quaker process isn't renown for its speed so we'll no doubt get a good few years worth out of their labours before much changes! Similarly there is plenty for the MM Outreach Committees to be picking up on meanwhile now we have at least got the outreach conversation going on a national level at our recent Summer Gathering.

One of the perks of the job I have helping put together the Documents in Advance for Yearly Meeting is not only getting to read all the contributions early, but being immersed in them for several weeks. Much better preparation than the hasty skim read prior to and during scheduled discussion of them that has been far more common for me over the years. I'm keen to see where the review process takes us this year and what impact it has had already on the Meetings around the country. The view has been put forward already that the issue before us is a spiritual one as much as a structural one, and if we revitalize the spiritual the rest will follow. I agree that spiritual nourishment and renewal is vital, and will indeed lead to more Friends being willing to 'live the transformation', but we still need to figure out how to underpin that work with a better functioning structure. I've often heard it said that the reason Quakers survived well beyond the other dissenting churches that started around the same time was due to the organizational structure and skills of the likes of Margaret Fell. This was repeatedly used as a reason for not changing things when Britain YM reviewed its own structure about a decade ago - it had worked for 350yrs why change it?! Well, actually it wasn't working all that great and from what I can tell from here (having emigrated as it was in the middle of happening) the changes have led to a revitalized Yearly Meeting. So whilst I took some persuading initially in Britain, I'm all for reorganizing things here.

Admittedly I have a vested interest in putting forward the view that it makes sense to pay someone to do more of the administrative tasks to free up Friends to work on building our spiritual communities, work on our social testimonies, strengthen our Meetings and do outreach, as I'd love to be doing that work for more than the current 100 hours a year. But it makes sense to me as a model anyway. Having grown up with the resources of Friends House in London on tap, and on a much smaller scale the Scotland General Meeting administrator role I suppose that is no surprise. Additionally I don't have as many decades of attachment to the local system to shed as others do, and I do have the benefit of an international perspective. Not only have I been part of more than one Yearly Meeting, my involvement with FWCC over the years, first with the Europe & Middle East Section and now the Asia West Pacific Section, as well as global events like the 2004 Triennial, WGYF 2005 and the 2012 World Conference, means I've come across a wide range of Quaker experience and practices.

So we'll see how the year unfolds, but first there is the rest of the World Plenary to follow! Here's hoping the wifi holds out and Friends continue to find the time and energy to share their experiences with us as they happen.

preparation vs planning

Ooops, November seemed to get away on me. I've had this half written for a while though....

I have a reputation for being organized. I'm not entirely convinced that I deserve it (especially having missed out on blogging in November!), and many the occasion has been when I've felt well if I'm the organized one heaven help everyone else. However having known several people who really would fail to organize the proverbial piss-up in a brewery maybe it's all relative.

After 30 years or so of planning Quaker events, 5 years of juggling up to 4 part time jobs simultaneously (not to be recommended I hasten to add!) and finding myself in life situations both through work and my personal life where organizing others has been required, as well as organizing myself I suppose I do have a tendency to try to plan.

But slowly over the years and particularly in recent months I've been learning the difference between planning and preparation. You can't plan for every eventuality no matter how much time is spent on risk management strategies. Rules will get broken in ways you haven't thought of, the unpredictable will happen and there is no legislating for the quirks of human nature, nor mother nature come to that.

I was jokingly saying to someone a while ago how it's always good to have a 'plan b' up your sleeve, but the concept of 'plan b' does rather rely on there being a 'plan a' in the first place. Right now in life I have no 'plan a', and as Steve Hanson put it the only thing I have up my sleeve is my arm. I have hopes and dreams, and one or two 'well if nothing else turns up I can always do...' options, but there are too many variables beyond my control to make firm plans.

So instead of trying to plan I'm focusing on preparing instead. The downsizing/decluttering is a part of this, so is trying to maintain a certain level of voluntary work so I can keep a handle on just what my capacity is for paid work should something suitable and manageable come along, and being realistic about this. Whilst the theory of a regular extra couple of hours or so a day looks good on paper, the reality is flexi-time is still far more sensible. Some days my brain still decides that today is not a day for thinking, making decisions or even any sense of the world, and still I easily get overwhelmed. Thankfully the worst days come around far less often than they used to, but they crop up often enough for me to still have to factor them in to the equation. Those days however are great for getting simple tasks done at home that don't need much thinking about, and I now have a pile/list of them so I don't even have to try to remember what they!

Another side of the preparation is continuing my journey in extending my urban homesteading skills. Obviously these skills are useful right now, but being able to learn them when I have plenty time and have a well equipped home and garden at my disposal helps me figure out just what I would need in terms of time/energy and resources to carry on doing it in 'the future'. There are many more things that yes I could make my own of, but is it really what I want to spend my time and (limited) energy doing?

I'm being more proactive regarding my 'well if nothing else turns up...' options; doing a bit of research and sounding out some ideas, so when I finally do have to make a decision it can be a more informed one which hopefully will ease the pressure on making proper plans somewhat. I suppose it is like an extension of the Civil Defense Emergency kit, you never know exactly what might happen, but having some basics sorted out in advance means the essentials are hopefully covered in the short term.

Be prepared. All those years in Guides obviously taught be something useful after all!

roots

I've been doing some research into the family of my maternal grandmother, whose surname was Cox. Having never really come across the name much I was somewhat taken aback by just how common it was in the part of Gloucestershire they come from (near Stroud, should you be interested!). If that wasn't enough it appears that just about every family in the village had a daughter who was either born Ann Cox or became Ann Cox through marriage, which made tracing my Great x3 Granny even more complicated!

The menfolk have somewhat less common names; Laban, Benjamin, Ira & Reuben. So that should've be easier right? Yeah right... how can people simply disappear for a couple of decades? Or appear in a census as very much alive thank you but not appear in any Death records? Well not that we could find at first, leaving a conundrum - Laban must've died somewhere otherwise he'd be 190yrs old by now, and much as the idea appeals I didn't think we had Time Lords or Immortals in the family.

So in an attempt to make sense of some of what was going on I started looking at the bigger picture; how come so many people from Bisley, Gloucestershire ended up in Halifax, West Riding of Yorkshire around the mid 1800s, and who were they?

After trawling through the census records from 1841 (the first one done) to 1891 for the district I started tracking various families and individuals over the years. I've no idea (yet...) how many of the Cox families listed are related to me, but I found myself getting quite emotionally involved in their histories. Having studied this period for my Social & Economic History A Level, plus having read a fair amount of historical fiction set in this era, I know a reasonable amount about it. However it was one thing learning about it in an abstract fashion, and quite another following the lives and deaths of real people, especially when they might be related to me. It was sobering to see how many children simply didn't make it from one census to the next, ten years later. The oldest person I recorded was 75, and few got to more than 60. Children as young as 7 and 8 had occupations listed next to their names in the 1841 census, and the designation 'pauper' was next to several names. One was living in the workhouse and another the local orphanage, several were servants in later decades and the earlier ones were full of weavers and spinners of both wool and silk, workers at various stages of the walking stick manufacturing industry (stick cutters, varnishers, polishers and bone carvers). Watermen (whatever that may mean!), railway labourers and agricultural labourers made regular appearances but the trade that cropped up again and again was stonemasonry, and that is what took sometimes just the menfolk, but sometimes entire families, up to Halifax.

According to a local history website, the district had had a lot of textile small scale industry, both wool and silk. The industrial revolution hit the area hard in the mid 1830s and many were left out of work. I've not yet figured out what the stonemasons were all working on until the 1850s that kept them in the area, but in the 1851 and 1861 census returns there are several families where the 'head' of the household is absent and the wife listed as 'wife of a stonemason'. Family tradition has it that Halifax Town Hall was built by members of our family (plus a few hundred others no doubt...) and that seems to be born out by the number of stonemasons from Bisley, including a few Coxs, who appear in the Halifax census returns in 1861.

Eventually the mystery was solved, it turned out that there weren't two Labans in the Bisley area about 10yrs apart in age, but just the older one, and someone had stuffed up (made up?) his age on a subsequent census entry. It turns out that his son Benjamin, my G.G.Grandad was from his second marriage, and the other Coxs they are later listed as living with in Halifax are from the first marriage. The reason it was all confusing is in the earliest census returns Laban is listed as living with his first family, and in the later one in Bisley he's just with his younger family, the older children being at a different address.

So it appeared that alas, no Time Lords in the family after all. Well that was until we started trying to research Benjamin's wife Janet who appears in the marriage register, several census records and the death register, but is conspicuous by her absence from any birth registers or census returns from the part of Scotland where she was supposedly born and spent her childhood! I'm reasonably certain she didn't die from having her head lopped off with a sword though as that would've caused quite a stir in Halifax in 1917, so that at least rules out her being an Immortal! Seems we're stuck with invisible for the time being instead.

A bizarre twist to the tale has been in relating some of these research challenges to long standing friends I've found that two of them also have Cox ancestry in the family from that part of Gloucestershire! I know it has long been said that Quakers makes the world a smaller place, but I wasn't expecting to end up potentially related to people I've known over half my life who also happen to have made their home in Aotearoa NZ!

WGYF+10: nostalgia, reflection, and looking forward

I'm not sure quite why it has taken several weeks to finish this post, probably because the right words kept eluding me, but having to get something written down for Thomas helped give shape the bits I'd been struggling to encapsulate. Anyway, 'tis good enough, and it will have to do...

WGYF 2005 participants plus children

It is 10 years now since the World Gathering of Young Friends 2005, was held in Lancaster, UK. Thomas pitched the idea of a reunion event that would also be part of the preparation for those going to the FWCC Plenary in Peru in January 2016, and he made it happen. It wasn't until I got there that I really appreciated how nice it was to just turn up as a participant at a WGYF event! Something I hadn't had to organize or feel any responsibility for, that was a real gift for which I am incredibly grateful.

Accompanied by the next generation we had a very literal reminder of what 'fruit had been born' in the intervening years. Sharing the less obvious fruit that had grown out of WGYF was a really special experience. We drifted between a worship sharing mode and discussion as felt moved and there was a real depth to the time spent recalling what stood out for us most about WGYF itself, the Triennial here in 2004 that led up to it for four of us, and the subsequent impact on the following decade.

We had Ben, Lucas and Saskia join us as they are all hopefully heading to Peru in January, along with Charlotte and Thomas, so the ease with which we dropped into that deep sharing cannot fully be pinned on the collective shared WGYF experience. But the fact that we had so much shared spiritual experience between us I am sure helped us slip into the space so easily and comfortably. I found myself holding back a couple of times from saying something as I 'knew' that a someone was about to speak and I knew my contribution could, and should, wait until after it.

There are some groups where I am hesitant to engage with fully at a deep level as I feel vulnerable, and unclear as to whether that is the right space or time for certain sharings. The old 'not wanting to sound silly' anxiety is a long standing acquaintance of mine. Yet in this space there were no such worries, no holding back. Even in an over dinner conversation that included visiting local Friends I was able to better articulate something I've been grappling with in recent years than ever before. The sense of everyone really wanting to make this work, that had flowed through WGYF itself, carried on and really enabled us to all be fully present, no mean achievement with young children around!

I've been trying to distill from that weekend some coherent thoughts to pass on to Thomas who offered to write up a collective piece on the event for our national Friends Newsletter. What was it about the WGYF experience that I carry with me today in my life and into my future? Two things that really stand out for me are the Meeting for Worship to discern the theme for WGYF, and the strong sense of calling to do the administrator job. Both of which happened the year before the event itself.

The Meeting for Worship was at the FWCC Triennial in Auckland January 2004. It remains the most amazing worship I have ever been part of, and at over two hours is most definitely the longest unprogrammed Quaker worship I've been part of. Yet somehow the time flew by, it gave us some insight into the early days of Quakerism and the lengthy Meetings for Worship that seemed to to be fairly common at the time, with or without a lengthy sermon from George Fox and others. There was a palpable sense of the spirit moving in that Meeting, and yet when we looked back at it the four of us there at the weekend who had been part of it had very different, but equally high impact memories of it. In some ways that Meeting has overshadowed every Meeting for Worship I've been part of since, as none have had quite the same feel. Although there have been a few that have come close.

In a similar way the incredible sense that the administrator job had my name on it has made other leadings feel more vague and shaped by my will as much as any leading of the spirit. I'm not saying that sense of calling hasn't been there, as it has. But nothing quite like that almighty kick up the backside that sent me hurtling into a whirlwind of 18mths living, breathing, and often dreaming, WGYF around the clock. Part of me yearns for that overpowering sense of purpose, yet at the same time the mere thought of of it is exhausting! It was achievable for a shortish set period of time, but as a way of life??? Can that same drive to do whatever be compatible with ordinary life, one that has time and space for other things and people, and can it be done without being detrimental to my health?

The event itself in all honesty is a bit of a blur. In the flurry of WGYF related posts on Facebook as the 10 year anniversary came around Betsy shared a photo (amongst many others) of me sitting at a computer in the corner of the administration team's office with my back to the rest of the room engrossed in whatever it was that needed doing. I have some very vivid memories of sitting in that chair, including receiving Loida's email about getting the delayed Friends from Bolivia and Peru to WGYF 'Miracles we can do, the impossible takes a little longer'. That line summed up a lot of the achievements in making the event happen. Still I find out new things that took place somewhere along the line to make WGYF happen that I had no idea about, and I was the one supposedly in the thick of it with a finger in every pie! It really does feel like a miracle that it happened at all.

I keep coming back to something Leith said at the weekend, and has written about for our Friends Newsletter that she has shared with us, about the importance of the stories that were shared, of the inspirational people that were there, the many and varied ways in which Friends put their faith into action in their lives. There were many there passionately pursuing their causes in life who stood out like beacons, successors of the Valiant Sixty perhaps? But there were also those whose light wasn't as blinding who still inspired a reassessment and taking stock of how our faith integrated into our daily lives. It isn't given to all of us to be 'speaking truth to power' at QUNO, FCNL or QCEA etc, or being International Observers in Palestine with CPT or EAPPI, or being out there in the thick of aid and development work with AFSC, QPSW, Peace Corps or many other agencies. To me those are the dauntingly scary tasks that I'm very grateful others feel called to do and it never failed to amaze me to hear the stories of those, often a decade or more younger than me, going out into the field or working in the political arena. These were Young Friends, between the ages of 18-35 remember, which is why it sticks in my craw somewhat when I hear older Friends lamenting the lack of younger Friends 'getting involved'. If only those Friends could hear some of the stories we did.

Equally powerful were the stories of those working within their own communities to bring people together, share resources and learning, resolve conflicts and create a better environment for all. These stories were often the ones that had the most power in that you'd more often come away thinking 'I could do that too...', which then begs the question 'so why don't you?'

It wasn't just the activists working for change that inspired me from within the WGYF community, but the depth of soul searching, prayer and seeking clearness that often accompanied or prompted it. As administrator I was privileged to get to read all the application forms that came in and get an advanced insight into those about to be gathered, and I was rather relieved when reading them I hadn't had to fill one in! I could much better articulate my readiness to perform the practical tasks of enabling such an event happen than I could find the spiritual language to express what I could give or hope to get from participating from the event at a deeper level. By the end of it all though, through a process that at times felt like total immersion surrounded by those to whom such words came more easily, I had started to find my own voice, and better articulate my experience of the movement of the spirit without feeling awkward or silly.

I met many people through WGYF who I continue to admire greatly to this day. I get a a little glow of reflected glory every time I see a WGYF name pop up on the international Quaker grapevine - whether they are working for their YM, running seminars, taking up Quaker posts in educational establishments or the kind of organisations I mentioned earlier. The mission statement spoke of creating the next generation of Quaker leaders, words I wasn't fully comfortable with when I first heard them as the concept of 'leadership' is often linked with a hierarchy we generally don't have. But I will say this, there are an awful lot of 'weighty Friends' around the world who went to WGYF 2005, which I think means we can claim that that mission was certainly accomplished! To take all the credit for it would be ridiculous, but as Jonathan put it, WGYF reinforced a trajectory he was already on. I know that for some people WGYF sent them hurtling off in a new direction, for others more the quiet reassurance that they were on the right track.

For me, it felt like a stepping stone in a journey of having faith that the universe will show me the way; the next step being to get to Aotearoa NZ and be Resident Friend in Wellington, the one after that to undertaking my ECE training, but the last few years I've had a feeling of being stuck midstream. Not without things to do mind, and maybe I've needed this time to take stock and sort a few things out in life.

But where is that journey taking me now? I think the simple living and plain dress discussions that I ended up in at WGYF have definitely shaped the downsizing I'm currently in the midst of. It isn't so much the 'live simply so others can simply live' ideology, worthy as that is, that drives this but an increasing awareness of my footprint on this planet and my attempt to reduce that. Being able to live less encumbered massively increases ones ability to go where the spirit blows you too. Some of the threads of conversations had and stories heard feel like they are starting to come together and form a new pattern, and I'm pretty sure that conversations from this weekend that have built on those from the last ten years will in time be seen to be milestones on that journey.

Whatever happens, I am really grateful to have been blessed with such amazing fellow travellers on this WGYF journey. I cannot imagine my life without them, even when most are only a Facebook post in my day. Seeing the energy that buzzed round in Kenya 2012 when the WGYF 1985ers got together for a photo op, as well as us 2005ers, just reinforced for me how lasting that connection is, irrespective of how well or often you've kept in touch over the intervening years. We were a great people to be gathered and we are still seeing what Love can do in our lives, and long may that continue.

WGYF+10 particpants

looking forward, looking back

A week tomorrow I set off towards a WGYF+10 reunion in the Kahuterawa Valley near Palmerston North. The event was originally planned for June, but due to clashing diary dates it got rescheduled for August which proved to be a Good Thing as the original date saw much of that region under floodwater, the silt from which is causing major problems and it will take years for the Whanganui & Manawatu River regions to fully recover. The new date also happens to be bang on the actual anniversary of the event which was 16-24th August 2005!

I've got a box of things that I've been putting together ready to take with me - various photos, cards and reports, plus a pile of FWCC stuff as the reunion is also partially preparation for those heading to Peru in January. I've also got a bundle of things I'm gifting on as part of my decluttering/downsizing, plus a patchwork quilt to deliver.

There have been a number of elements surrounding this event that have held a certain symmetry with those of 10yrs ago. The new dates mean Fran can no longer be with us for the reunion as she's relocated back to the UK (for now!) and as she said, the whole WGYF planning and happening was whilst she was transitioning between the UK and Aotearoa in the opposite direction. Charlotte, Jonathan and Thomas had all been at the 2004 FWCC Triennial with me in Auckland, and Charlotte and Thomas will now be heading for Peru. And once again I'm in major clear-out mode, although this time with no intention of moving anywhere in a hurry, let alone emigrate! I'm sure as the weekend progresses next week we'll find more such connections.

Today's major mission was sorting through a pile of paperwork and filing. Originally I just started to look for something (which I've yet to find!) but the task took on a life of it's own. It was rather therapeutic to consign a huge amount of paper to the recycling, fire and printer pile. That which ended up on the fire was a collection of UK official paperwork that had long since passed it's 7 year 'keep until' date. Another step of my transition from one side of the world to the other. So after investing in a new concertina file I have now managed to reduce the amount of space such paperwork takes up quite considerably.

Towards the end of the pile of paperwork I was working through I found a piece I'd written, possibly for our GM or MM newsletter, but I can't remember writing it let alone why! It had been written at some point during my time as the WGYF administrator, so it felt timely to rediscover it. So I can recycle the paper version I'll type it up as a post (Tomorrow? Too near bedtime to start that now!). It was good to get a reminder of that part of my spiritual journey as it is all too easy to remember the practical challenges of making such an event happen, whereas which parts of my spiritual life link to that event rather than anything in the subsequent decade I find a little harder to untangle now. Maybe I should re-read the first few months of this blog to remind myself of the impact, although I suspect more posts will be about the practicalities of emigrating!

Another reminder of what feels like a past life was a page I'd written up for a 'getting to know you' session at Summer Gathering - what isn't obvious is whether that's NYFSG (these days Summer Shindig) or Summer Gathering here as 'SG' could mean either! Reading through the games and ideas there are things I'd totally forgotten about - I haven't played 'Radio Cars' in years! Thankfully the notes are detailed enough to remind me how to play them all too, much better than a list I came across in one other clearout some years back that was just several columns of game names but with no explanations. Having said I'll help organize JYF Camp next year it is good resource to find - now to find somewhere to keep it where I'll be able to locate it again in time... such facilitation and planning is an area in life I feel decidedly rusty in. Yet a decade ago Ruth, Susie and I planned an entire Link Group w/e in 20 minutes! I found the cd I'd done for them for the Friday night epilogue a few days ago, I'm planning to recycle that one at Summer Gathering here after Christmas! I hadn't got to that Glasgow w/e due to WGYF commitments, so it feels right to be planning to reuse it in this time of remembering a decade ago.

Given the general inter-connectedness of all things Quaker, I suppose it is unsurprising to be coming across so many links, both tangible and otherwise, between life now and ten years ago. I think of the people who were such an enormous part of my life back then, and where they are now. Mary (from Australia) is even back in Edinburgh for the Festival! Bar some long standing couples, none of us are living in each others inboxes and daily lives in quite the same way as we were in the run up to WGYF. Many of those people I haven't seen since, which feels way too long. But an email I got this morning from Katy (who I've known since my early days as a YF in the UK, but who also lives here) summed up what I know to be true of those connections too: Whenever I catch up with you, and other friends, like this, I ask myself why it doesn't happen more often! But perhaps it doesn't really need to: we pick up from where we left off, however long the gap. 

The same is also true for those I'll see next weekend, and whether it is less than 8 weeks or over 8 years (the two extremes!) since I last saw them, I know I can look forward to a weekend of deep sharing, love, laughter and f/Friendship that I'll treasure and carry with me for years more to come.

inspiration

I recently spent a long weekend at our Quaker Yearly Meeting which was held at the Quaker Settlement in Whanganui. It was reassuring to look back on YM last year and appreciate how much better I am healthwise compared to then. I managed to stay up chatting for 3 out of 5 nights away from home which I was very impressed with myself for managing given there was no leeway for a lie in!

One of those evenings was spent talking to Tracey about our future life options - downsizing featured big time for both of us. Seeking the flexibility it gives you to pretty much go anywhere fairly easily was high on both our lists of priorities. I'm in no hurry to move house, but when the time comes to do so I love the idea of being free to go wherever the spirit blows me without having to spend a silly amount of money moving or keeping things in storage. I (still!) don't have a long term life plan, but various posts on Facebook from friends struggling for assorted reasons have kindled the idea of having a time of being a Mary Poppins and going where needed to help out for a few weeks or months at a time before putting down roots anyplace else, although that obviously depends on being healthy enough to be useful.

One possible option to make that work (albeit with the cooperation of willing drivers!) is of course to have a Tiny House. Then I can take my home with me as sadly I don't have a carpet bag like Mary Poppins' or a handbag like Hermione's to fit in everything I'll need, and more importantly it would give me a quiet space of my own which massively increases the odds of staying healthy.

So when in the session the day after Tracey and I had been discussing this it was mentioned that QIET had funded a loan for a Tiny House our ears pricked up! Oooooh, maybe it could actually be possible?

The next day again after a presentation about the Settlement there were various guided tours around parts or all of the grounds. Lured by the words 'close and flat' (as opposed to a quick march over the hill in order to see the new dam and still be back in time for lunch!) and 'food forest' I followed Merilyn to see some of the new food production areas that they are developing on permaculture principles. I'm a big fan of improving the food productivity of the space we have available in an easy to maintain manner so I was keen to pick up a few tips and see how this aspect of the Settlement was developing.

At the end of the tour we stopped by at Michael & Merilyn's very small caravan which they are now living out of and renting out their house to a family who need the space far more than they do. Wow, it makes a Tiny House seem palatial! Granted they have all the communal facilities of the Settlement available to them, plus their daughter's house a few steps away complete with hot shower should they choose to use it rather than the cold outside one, which is quite different to having just that space available to them. But still it was a huge eye opener as to what they have found to be possible. Apparently the biggest challenge according to Merilyn was paring their clothes down to fit in the small wardrobe - which is about the size I thought would do just fine for me alone, and I thought that was fairly minimal!

It was lovely to hear Merilyn share how much she had enjoyed gifting various possessions that they needed to get rid of to fit into such a minute space, especially after recently writing this post about much the same. It renewed my determination to keep up that process and part with other things I've long since stopped using but haven't quite been able to let go of yet.

On a practical level it was interesting to hear how well insulated their caravan is, it is even double glazed and so is quite warm enough in winter. It could be another option for me, but I'm not (yet?) ready to let go of the few items of furniture I've inherited which could fit in a Tiny House, but not a caravan. Plus I suspect that a modern caravan of those specs would be a considerable financial outlay and the advantage of a Tiny House build is you don't need all the money at once, although it sounds like QIET would be up for lending it if needed. Something to ponder on, just as well there is no rush for a decision to be made!

Part of passing on the baton of my FWCC YM rep role to Ben was leaving him and Thomas with my supplies of spare copies of various AWPS newsletters and Friends World News etc whilst at YM. And that's another folder of stuff cleared out into the bargain! What's more that now means my files all now fit in my box-shelf properly and it looks a whole heap tidier, excellent.

So I got home with added determination to work my way through the remaining boxes that are out at Pukepoto, and reduce further the stuff I have here. I knew I had to get straight on to it whilst the fire was still burning in my belly rather than let it go back to smoldering embers which take that bit more effort to get going again. So I resolved to let go of a couple of much loved but rarely worn up here thick woolly cardigans. Perfect for Edinburgh and Wellington winters they might have been, but they just don't work for Far North frost at breakfast but back in t-shirts by lunchtime kind of days. I've hung on to them partly as I initially didn't know how long I'd be up here (at 8yrs and counting I think I can safely say it'll be a while...) and they'd come in handy if I ever moved back to Welly or similar. Well yes they would, but my multiple thin layers also work in cold places and when I do go there in winter I never take my big thick cardies anyway as they are big and thick and fill up half my rucksack!

So after a flash of inspiration one has already been re-homed to Christchurch, the other is still being deliberated over, but I'm ready to let it go. Looking round my room I was wondering 'what next?' and kept coming back to a shelf full of photo albums. I've scanned quite a lot of my photos now, mostly old Quaker ones to upload to Facebook so even though they pre-date film developed onto cds let alone digital I do now have electronic copies so I'm contemplating making some printed photobooks which will take up a fraction of the space. That will be a long term project to work through, but distinctly possible... my books on the other hand pose far more of a challenge.

Since getting home I've been on a roll of ticking off little jobs needing done, and I hope to keep up the momentum. Some of them are things I've been meaning to do for ages but haven't quite had the time and energy simultaneously, many of them are UFOs and PHDs (unfinished objects and projects half done) which take up a disproportionate amount of space in that state, both literally and mentally. The trick now is not to start other things but leave them unfinished as I uncover more potential projects!

Once getting the YM Minutes ready for the printers is done I'll be back to waiting in faith that 'something' work-wise will turn up. But it feels like I really have a longer term life project (downsizing) to focus on, and give a sense of purpose to my time. No matter where I end up living after here likely is to have less space rather than more, and it will be easier to go where the spirit blows me if I have less 'stuff' to move/store/fit in. However I can't quite see me reaching this level of downsizing, no matter how inspirational her story is!

clearing out (again...)

I'm having another of life's clear-outs. Slowly but surely I'm plodding my way through the remaining boxes in the shed at Pukepoto, bringing them in to town, going through them and absorbing what remains into my current space in the world. I'm determined not to add any boxes to the garage here, not that there's really any space to do so anyway as it is full of J&O's stuff!

Also over most of the last year I've been having a mental/emotional clear-out of stuff that is unhelpful through counselling. So it was somewhat bemusing to come across something I wrote about fifteen years ago about much the same thing, and how useful it had been. So in order to be able to clear another bit of physical clutter out of my life, here is what I wrote so the pages can hit the recycling pile...

[For those of you out there who were regular readers of YQ at the time and are thinking 'I don't remember reading this before' don't worry, it isn't old age taking it's toll. You most likely haven't. Just because I said I'd write something, which I finally did, doesn't mean I'd also actually get around to sending it in, which I suspect never quite happened!!]

Some time ago (er... May '87 to be honest - Kendal YFCC!) I promised then YQ Editor Jonathan Kemp that I'd write 'something' for YQ, 'after my exams'. Thankfully I don't remember specifying which exams, but having sat the last ones in '92 I feel as though I'm still somewhat overdue in writing!

So what has prompted me after all these years to finally get around to it?

Guilt. Plain and simple.

Over the last six months I've ended up having to do a lot of looking back over my life. Trying to figure out why I am where I am today, who I am, and what on earth am I doing with my life. You know, all the nice easy ones.

Part of the process has been counselling after it finally sank in that my head can only take so much without a good clear out. The amount of stuff that had just been pushed to the back of my mind 'for now' had built up to the point where if anything even vaguely difficult or challenging occurred I couldn't cope. Not a good situation to be in when you work with people with challenging behaviour.

So off I went, somewhat reluctantly at first, to counselling. Deciding to go was a big step in itself. If I had a pound for every time in my life someone had said to me "You're coping so well", "You always seem to manage, how do you do it?" etc etc I could retire tomorrow. When the world thinks you are coping it is very difficult to turn around and say well actually I'm not, can you help? Especially if they've just said that they couldn't do it themselves!

I'm getting there, but it's not always easy to bring out painful memories and look at them again. At least there's some more space in my head again though and I don't throw a wobbly every time someone else does!

Another part of the process has been physically having a clear out. As anyone who's ever visited me knows I've got rather a lot of 'stuff'. Due mainly to being put in a 'take it or it goes' situation when my parents moved house some years ago. So whilst most of you have children's books, teddies, jigsaws and toys safely stowed away in attics and spare bedrooms elsewhere, mind were under my bed, on top of my wardrobe, and fighting for shelf space along with my university notes. Like the ever promised article, I never quite got around to sorting through it all.

Then suddenly, a couple of years ago, I had to shift all my stuff several times in as many weeks, up and down far too many stairs. My life had changed, my future was unclear, but one thing was certain, some of the stuff had to go. Slowly but surely over the next four months I started to whittle it down. Another house move, still too much stuff - keep going! A year on and like all good resolutions I'd slowed down to a virtual stop, but then came the promise of a new home - somewhere stable, permanent, but small.

Bin bags were filled, boxes cleared, endless carrier bags dumped exhaustedly at the Shelter Shop. The big move came - would it all fit in? Well sort of, ish. So more had to go but but was getting harder. All the easy to part with stuff had gone. Then one day hiding from the rain in a bookshop I found my saviour 'Clear your clutter with Feng Shui' by Karen Kingston. You wouldn't believe what I've managed to do since reading it.

Clearing out clutter is in itself very theraputic - as long as you manage to throw things away and not put them back 'for now...'. In so many ways we are defined by our possessions and the things we surround ourselves with. I had an incredible amount of stuff which I'd felt I 'ought' to keep rather than wanted to. The old 'it might come in handy one day' kind of thing mixed up with 'but so-and-so gave me that'. Are my memories of people and my past so fragile that I need to keep everything? It's quite a question to ask yourself.

I compromised and started a scrapbook, it's got old tickets from concerts and the cinema, some train tickets, old NUS cards, railcards and so on so I can cringe at old photos of me, mementos from events and people. It's been good fun doing it. It satisfies a childlike instinct to play with scissors, glue and sellotape too! If I can't remember something when I find it in my sorting out it goes.

Yet with my dread of amnesia quashed with the scrapbook and so much more parted with, I still haven't finished. But there are now just a few hats on top of the wardrobe instead of a precarious pile to the ceiling, there's space in the cupboards and no longer a pile of boxes lurking in every corner of the flat.

So where has all this got me? My head is being cleared out, the flat is being tidied up, but there's still a pile of stuff that remains to be dealt with, the 'pending' tray in life. That's where this article came in. No matter how hard I 'd tried to forget that I'd ever said I'd write anything the memory kept coming back to haunt me. There are a few other things in the tray too, and I'm trying to get it emptied by the end of the year, clear it out and not let it get so full again.

Maybe someone will read this and realize that they can sort things out too. I hope so. It always seemed like such an enormous task, too big to tackle, But if you break it down into little bits, like writing an article for YQ, it can stop being so daunting, and you might even find you enjoy it!

Post script, fifteen years later...

I laugh now at the thought of that flat being small. Sure it was for the amount of gubbins we crammed in to it, but having lived with far less stuff for many years now, and spent rather a lot of time reading articles about Tiny Houses, I have a somewhat different perspective these days.

I was in that flat for four and half years before life got turned on its head yet again. Not that I'm complaining as it was the beginning of the journey that led me to a life in Aotearoa NZ, but I think had you told me what was coming back then I'd've baulked at the thought of it. Well that is once I'd picked myself up off the floor and gotten over a stitch from laughing for long enough to ask 'Are you serious?'

So no, life hasn't exactly been plain sailing since then, and it is amazing how much extra internal clutter one can acquire in fifteen years, even if you've got better at keeping the physical stuff under control. But over all I still believe what I wrote then, I just wish I'd reminded myself sooner...

simply complex

Over the last few weeks I've been compiling and editing Documents in Advance for our Yearly Meeting - 88 pages of contributions from Monthly Meetings, various committees and other bodies we work with/help fund. Basically it is the national Quaker annual report prior to our AGM (Yearly Meeting) which is in May.

It has been an interesting process. As with anything to do with organizing Quakers it has been an exercise akin to herding cats. As a teenager I first heard the joke if you ask 10 Quakers what Quakers believe you'll get a dozen answers and a list of books to read as long as your arm, well I'm thinking there should be a similar one about collecting statistics. Compiling what I still think of as the Tabular Statement but here is simply 'Yearly Meeting Statistics' was enlightening. I had no idea there were so many ways in which to give the information requested in a completely different order from the questions asked, and ways to re-interpret the question to make extracting the desired information a challenge! Then of course there are the occasions when the maths simply doesn't hold water (3+2 does not equal 4, especially when you are counting children!), or people you know exist simply don't appear in the count - do you add them in, knowing they are there, or stick to the numbers you were given even though they don't match reality as you know it to be? Which of these options shows integrity and truthfulness?! How many times do you go back to a Worship Group to query the same piece of information when each new answer just leaves you more confused than you were to start with?! Oh and what actually counts as a Meeting for Worship for Business? I suspect the answer being sought was how many times did you hold Monthly Meeting, but that wasn't the question asked and it was interpreted in several different ways.

Aside from the above complications and some interesting interpretations of deadlines that required a lot of last minute re-formatting of pages (repeatedly...) it has been a privilege to be part of the process. I'm looking forward to the next step of White Pages, which records the responses and questions from Friends and (hopefully!) the answers from the relevant post holders and committees.

I'm anticipating having to answer a few queries myself, even though as secretarial assistant I don't have a report in there myself. Docs in Advance will look a little different this year. It is a little longer than normal this year, partly that is due to some extra material and some lengthier than usual reports, not to mention the fact that everything bar one set of accounts turned up in time (ish...) to make it in rather than having to appear later in White Papers. But partly it is due to using a different typeface - Calibre takes up a little more space than Times New Roman, but it is a much easier font for those with dyslexia to read. And when faced with 88 A4 pages of type to read and make comments on, you don't want to have to battle against the font to make sense of it all.

Also this year it is 'perfect bound' ie with a glued spine rather than stapled. Apparently the cost is much the same, but the process of perfect binding is quicker (just as well as the printer stuffed up and forgot that the date for collection was rather critical!), and at 88 pages it was too thick for their stapling machine anyway. And on top of that (!) rather than a plain coloured card cover it will be a printed colour. We have had this before mind, although when Linley & Claire thought using the Chiefs colours in stripes was a good idea the year YM was being held in the Waikato region there were many comments about the 'German flag' on the cover, and they weren't all complimentary by a long chalk! Instead the 2Es have gone for a 'radical feminist purple' as their swan song as co-clerks. We'll see how well that goes down... But not only is the cover printed in colour rather than just black ink on coloured card, it is going to be matt laminated too. I think I must've been the first person the printers had ever come across who asked if it couldn't be plain instead, even though they were offering laminated for the same price! Quaker simplicity, especially when you're trying to uphold a commitment to reducing reliance on oil based products, can't half be complicated at times. At least it is matt laminating, a glossy cover would've been well beyond the pale.

So whilst I await the next lot of contributions for White Papers I've to design a form to (hopefully...) simplify the collection of statistics for next year. If nothing else they'll get given the same set of boxes to fill in as makes up the table; if it weren't unquakerly to do so though I'd bet you anything they'll still come back completed with multiple interpretations of the questions asked! It's all very well being a religion that attracts those who have a tendency towards questioning conformity, but there are times when it would be nice if we could manage to do everything the same way.

power-less

I'm sitting here listening to the rain (blessed rain!) and the thunder rolling around wondering if the power will stay on. This time though I've thought to have the laptop fully charged, as is my phone!

Last Sunday was a slightly different matter though. It was one of the usual planned power outages for line maintenance that we get here about once or twice a year. There is only one main power supply line to the Far North, although they are in the process of building a loop line round the East Coast. The construction and linking up of this being partly why the power outages are for so long and seem to come around more regularly than they used to. So at 8am prompt the power went off, to be reconnected just before 5pm.

After weeks and weeks of drought conditions the rainy weather finally had reached us a few days earlier and has hung around since. So on the one day in the summer when nice weather outside really would've been handy, it rained. Almost all day! Well we managed about 3/4hr in the garden in the afternoon before the light drizzle returned to big splodges of rain again. But nice as it would've been to be out there doing more the ground so desperately needed the water so we couldn't complain, and it was filling up our new water tanks nicely! Yes we could've carried on out there and just got wet as it was hardly cold, but unfortunately then your insect repellent gets washed off and oh boy are those mozzies loving the dampness...

Had we had power I would've been proofreading/editing articles for the Friends' Newsletter as it was our deadline day for contributions for the next issue. I would've been working on Documents in Advance had any new material come in (which it hadn't as it turns out, despite the Jan 25th deadline for much of it! Yep, herding cats again...), and I would've been joining in Monthly Meeting in Mt Eden (Auckland) via skype and no doubt doing some hand sewing throughout that. But no power so no internet, I hadn't remembered to charge up the laptop before the power went off, and thanks to the rain it was too dark for hand sewing without straining my eyesight.

Fortunately we'd organised to have Meeting for Worship here that morning, and the much appreciated return of the camping stove on it's usual long term loan after it's trip camping a couple of weeks ago meant we could even have a fresh cuppa rather than rely on thermos flasks! But even with chatting over a cuppa and munchies that only took up 2hrs of the day....

I had so many things I'd planned to do but didn't like more gardening, hand sewing and letter writing - the old fashioned pen and ink way! But somehow that didn't happen. A couple of hours got lost in books; I made a start on some cucumber pickle (then left it to sit overnight with salt on the veg drawing out the liquid, it turned out rather well if I do say so myself); I went through my wardrobe and ummed and ahhed over a few items that I hadn't worn in ages but that is because I haven't needed to look smart, and I guess I'd better assume that might need to happen again one day! I pulled out a couple of sleeveless tops I want to use to make a pattern from (a combination of the two styles) and got as far as putting them with the material and pattern-paper (aka lunchwrap!), but then got sidetracked trying things on, working out how much to shorten a dress I seldom wear to a tunic length, and making another cup of tea...

In short a day without power was easy enough to get through for me. It did make me reflect once again on how life would be oh so different without it either at all or on a rationed basis. When I spent the night at Edith's in Nairobi after the World Conference of Friends in 2012 the power went out about four or five times that evening, and that was considered normal. I guess you adapt. When so much of my life relies on having an internet connection to the rest of the country, and indeed the rest of the world, life would be radically different without a reliable power supply.

It was probably good to have a day where I had to take a good long break from the computer, although had I any say in the matter I wouldn't have picked that particular day! A gentle reminder to make sure I do so more often perhaps? Of course a fair amount of computer time is required every day at the moment, but as my hours at the keyboard increase I need to be mindful of work/life balance, especially when the distinction between 'work' and things done in my 'free time' gets a bit blurry. So for the next week or so I'm making a conscious effort to set time aside away from the computer each day to do something that I'm doing because I want to rather than because I have to! So whilst today's visit to WINZ doesn't count even though I was out of the house and away from the screen, going to Lorna's for the weekly mah jong session most certainly does. And the more of those things that don't require electrickery the better.

a patchwork life

Last summer I got given some patchwork fabric squares, fat quarters and eighths for Christmas/birthday presents. They sat in my cupboard all year as whilst I had some vague ideas I couldn't quite figure out what to do with them. As nothing immediately sprang to mind and given I was having a hard enough time keeping on top of the projects I already had to do I didn't exactly give the matter a lot of thought I have to admit.

Then as I started packing for Summer Gathering I realised that I could do with some hand sewing to take as I expected to spend a lot of time sitting quietly rather than rushing around being busy. I could've taken my rag rug project as Sue did, but it and the stuff I'm cutting up is a bit bulky and I was trying to pack light. Having seen the glorious technicolour of Sue's that she started at the previous Summer Gathering I'm rather relieved I left my rather dull looking version at home! The problem with using old clothes up for projects and trying to avoid buying anything for it is that you end up with the colours to use that you wear, which in my case meant a lot of black, brown, grey and dull greens with occasional brighter items thrown in. It's actually perfect for it's intended purpose which will be a doormat but that is somewhat beside the point. I did come home resolving to add brighter colours somehow!

Anyway having ditched the idea of taking the rug I needed something else so started looking again at the material I'd been gifted. I had some paper templates from an earlier piecing project so roughed up an idea for starting some stars within septagons and decided I'd figure out what to do with them later. Sometimes a project needs to just grow on it's own.

I thought I had taken far more templates than I'd need but I almost ran out by the end of the gathering and I had just short of 6 completed stars to bring home. I had a night in Auckland on the way back staying with old friends. Whilst dutifully admiring 7yr old Lucy's rotating disco lightbulb she'd saved up her pocket money to buy (it was pretty cool I have to admit, just not very good for reading by!) I caught sight of her patchwork duvet cover her mum had made. Of course! I'd been thinking I needed another duvet cover and the colours I had were perfect for my room - my friends know me well.

So I now have the beginnings of a plan and it is starting to come together. I'll need to get some extra fabric to make it work, but I'm still a way of reaching the stage where that is necessary, I can continue to work with what I've got. I started listening to Dune whilst I sew, so I've been working my way through my 100 Big Reads list at the same time - two birds with one stone!

On Facebook I saw a photo a friend had shared of a patchwork quilt she's started for her daughter and she mentioned the months of thinking, choosing and planning that had gone in to it. It made me reflect on this project's journey and I started seeing parallels between it and my life in general. When the 2Es (as our YM co-clerks are known) visited in February on their way to the Waitangi we discussed the plans for our YM venturing into the relatively uncharted waters of having a paid employee. Instead of having a secretary like Australia YM the plan was to start small and contract out various tasks. As my health was rapidly heading downhill at that stage and my confidence was going with it I couldn't see how it could be something I would be successful in applying for given the number of folk with far better DTP skills than me. However I chipped in with my experience of being a sole Quaker employee responsible to committees etc and how that had worked as they gathered information ready for our Yearly Meeting and the next stage of the process.

Since I was made redundant at the end of 2012 I'd been trying to figure out 'what next?' Yet other than being at home, taming the garden, doing more 'urban homesteading' and working towards a more sustainable life all I could come up with was working for Friends again. Which is a bit tricky in a Yearly Meeting that doesn't employ anyone! So I needed another idea, but none arrived however Phyllis did fall and need a hip replacement so I became a full time homebased carer for a while which did allow me to be at home, work on the garden etc etc etc. Be careful what you wish for! I wouldn't wish an emergency hip replacement on anyone.

After that I reluctantly did a bit more teaching even though I was fairly convinced it wasn't good for my health, and as if to prove a point that is when I really started to go downhill towards the end of 2013. Part of me wanted to hang on to the belief that the right job will turn up, but after a year and then some it was hard to keep that faith and financially it was becoming more of a challenge to hold out. So there I was with some concepts of what I wanted to do, but no ideas as to how to pull it together and make it happen. So like the fabric, the idea of working for Friends got stashed away for now, occasionally taken out and looked at with vague plans but nothing jumping out at me as the way forward.

Ironically being ill levelled out my finances as I started getting benefits to top up my small regular income. And by the time the fixed term job putting Documents in Advance together and other YM papers was advertised my health had improved enough to be able to apply in the hope that by the time it started I'd be properly up to it.

When the job started I just had to go for it and hope I could make it work. Luckily for me at the time (although possibly not for me in a fortnights time when the deadline rolls around!) not many contributions came in early so I had time to set up some systems and get my head around what needed done before actually having to do it.

It took several weeks to get the contract sorted, especially as one of the Monthly Meetings (mine as it happens!) decided to have a session considering guidelines for YM being an employer. So in the end my contract was signed with the caveat that this in no way was to be considered a template for future contracts without taking into consideration the current ongoing process of establishing best practice.

So we had the equivalent of the first strip of the quilt sorted out, what would happen next to be built up around it was very much still up in the air.

Whilst at Summer Gathering a group of us got together to consider how to go forward with a project that had been dormant for the last few years, but was still seen as an important part of our history as a community and there was a strong wish for it to continue. Could it be added to the secretarial role? someone asked, well not as it stands just now, but that doesn't mean it couldn't be in the future! Already Friends are starting to see ways of expanding the original role, extending the pattern yet within the existing colour scheme. What we're still waiting for is that collective lightbulb moment of seeing exactly what it is we need to be creating out of the bits and pieces we have to choose from.

It is going to be interesting to see how things develop this year, will the project get shelved after the first stage until the same time of year roles around again? Anyway whatever happens with the paid work at least I have some idea what I'm doing with my sewing for now! And having now finished Dune I wonder if I can tackle another book from the list whilst I'm at it?