Bad Quakers

Things you really shouldn't do during meeting for worship or moments of silence:

1) sleep
2) wink at people
3) bend over so far your hat falls off
4) make your grocery list
5) make small talk
6) crack your knuckles
7) kill ants
8) audibly clean your teeth
9) hit people

I've witnessed all of the above, though as far as I know I'm guilty only of 1 and 7.

Postscript, January 15: today I told a friend about this list, and she calmly answered, "Oh, we had someone die in meeting once."

Belonging

I love how familiar Pendle Hill feels to me now. I love sitting in meeting and not needing to look up when someone starts to speak because I know everyone's voice by heart. I love being able to identify who made a loaf of bread - Sarah's loaves are big and high-risen, mine small and diagonally slashed. Kurt's are carved with letters so that all eight loaves in order spell something.

Yesterday I was walking towards the building where I live, talking under my breath. A woman popped her head out of her apartment door as I passed. "Are you talking to God?" she asked, smiling beatifically.
"I'm talking to myself," I said.
"It's the same thing!" she answered. "It's the same thing!"

Best fashion advice ever

Carl, on the way to Quaker meeting this morning, to me (wearing a red shirt, blue striped skirt, purple socks, and bright pink rubber clogs): "You can't match too much or you'd look like a Muggle, anyway."

Love made visible

I'm now living and working at Pendle Hill, the Quaker center where I spent last summer. (Not going to Kazakhstan after all. Ask me if you want.)

One of the things I love about this place is the small objects that show great love put into them over the years. A decade ago when a 225-year-old oak came down, one of the maintenance workers saved some of the wood and made it into things like new seats for the stools in the craft studio. It probably would have been easier to just buy new stools, but I'm sure people were sad about losing the tree and were glad to have it preserved in some way.

The other bit of handiwork I found moving this week was the hotpads in the dining room. They're worn print cotton and corduroy, sewn into rectangles and stitched across with embroidery floss to keep the layers together. And where the fabric is shredding with age, you can see through to some previous layer of the hotpad from a previous generation, the cloth deemed too ragged but re-covered instead of thrown away. The potholders have certainly been around for longer than most of the people here, made and re-made by someone's careful hands.

At the top of the weekly chore chart here are the words Work is love made visible. These small objects made it particularly visible to me this week.

My two newest favorite things

1. Flannel shirts on cool days.

2. The FWCC, or Friends World Committee on Consultation, because it sounds like a parody of a Quaker committee but is in fact real. I made food for them this weekend, as they came to Pendle Hill to, um, consult. It seems they're a gang of old Quakers getting together to talk about how their various branches of Quakerism should stop being so crabby with each other. Vies with FLGBTQC (Friends for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Concerns), which has its own song so that people can remember it, for best Quaker acronym.

Looking at vegetables

After half a summer of farming, I'm afraid the most profound thing I have to say is that vegetables are really beautiful. I'm not the first to notice that food can have visual appeal - the different colors of beans and grains in the bulk foods aisle, the way broccoli turns brighter green when you steam it, the oranges and reds of salsa with bell peppers. But I'd never enjoyed food like this until I was growing it.

I wish I had pictures of the rainbow chard with its red and yellow stems and vibrant green leaves, or the shine on the skin of strawberry still hot from the sun, or the deep purple stain of beets when you slice them. Organic farms produce plenty of weird and imperfect-looking vegetables, but the lettuces especially look so perfect nestled in the boxes when we've harvested them (especially compared with supermarket lettuce, which is inevitably starting to rot). I enjoy the vegetables at least as much visually as I do any other way.

So, today's lesson: look at your food.