Yearly Meeting!

I have so much to post about...it will take me several posts and a number of days to catch up!

We made it to Yearly Meeting!

The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) has, like most religions, a number of structures. The basic unit for Friends is the Monthly Meeting, which is what meets on Sundays (First Days among Quakers), more or less. These Monthly Meetings are under the care of Yearly Meetings (a step up from Quarterly Meetings, but let's not go crazy), which are mainly geographic. Our Yearly Meeting is South Central Yearly Meeting and meets each year, on Easter weekend, at a lovely camp near Bruceville, Texas (half way between Temple and Waco). I had never managed to quite make it there before, but this year...we went!

We drove out on Friday morning and got there at around 3:30pm. An amazing 10 folks connected to our super-tiny Monthly Meeting went this year. Also, the old college friend of mine who was sort of responsible for getting my husband and I together, and whose mother is a Quaker, attended with her family. It was simply wonderful to see them and to finally meet her little boys. The Lone Star Girl thanked her for making her own existence possible - ha! We also met lots of new and wonderful friends.

The theme of this year's Yearly Meeting was Creating The World In Which We Want to Live. I went to some wonderful worship-sharing sessions on this theme as well as to regular Meeting for Worship and some Meeting for Business sessions, including the one in which a Friend from our Meeting read the Memorial Minute for our lost Friend. It was a very important time for me. I am in the midst of a lot of soul-searching about my path in life, career and parenting and the usual concerns for me...I may be continuing on the theme of big changes in my own life so I really needed this time to listen closely for the Inner Light and think about how to be the Light I want to see in the world.

It SNOWED on the eve of Easter!!! Real sticking-on-the-ground snow! On Easter! In Texas! It was gorgeous and amazing and...odd. Almost a miracle! The kids loved it and it was truly awe-inspiring.

The Lone Star Baby had a blast with our Meeting's new two-year-old in the daily programming for Little Friends. The Lone Star Girl, who had been surly about going, got to hang with the Junior Young Friends (middle school age) instead of the Upper Elementary Friends and she had the time of her life. It may well have been the first time she can remember that she was with girls her own age with remotely similar values - lots of vegetarians and radical leftists in the group all. She pretty much disappeared with her tribe for the weekend and I was ever so mature about leaving her alone and letting her revel in it. Although Meeting was deeply important to me personally, the Lone Star Girl's experience may have been the best thing we got out of it. She had been going through quite an annoyingly agnostic stage, and she came back, while not necessarily ready to embrace God-talk, All-About-Quakers. The rest will come. Quite a relief and, I think, the start of something very, very good for her. Lone Star Pa spent most of the trip helping out and being wonderful, but I think he had fun as well. He had quite a following of Connect-Four-playing elementary-aged boys trailing him. They even cleaned the snow off of our car.

We put the now-finished quilt on display and Friends made donations and signed their names to the border. We raised over $300 for the American Friends Service Committee...the girls were happy. The quilt is a thing of great beauty. It will go to the Ministry and Care Committee to be passed around to Friends in our Yearly Meeting who need some nurturing, and will be brought back to Yearly Meeting every year to raise more money for AFSC.

Both girls got to be in adorable plays on Talent Night on Saturday. The Little Friends class did The Funny Little Bunny With The Powder-Puff Tail, complete with toddler-constructed bunny ears and fluffy tails. The Junior Young Friends did a skit called If Pigs Could Fly in which the Lone Star Girl got to play W., before and after Flying Quaker Pigs turned him into a Quaker hippy. Great fun. We had singing and spontaneous jamming every night and folk dancing from all around the world as well. On Easter, there was even an Easter Egg Hunt for the Little Friends.

After lunch on Easter, it was time to go home, so we said our good-byes and drove away. It is hard to go back into the world. I will work hard to carry the Meeting within me.