Moving Beyond a Minute

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Transcript:

I’m always thinking is there more that I could be doing around the things that I care about? And climate is one of the things that I really, really care about. I thought, well, what have we been doing in our meeting? Is there more that I could do? And then I thought we could just get together. People who care about this issue could just get together and talk about what we’ve been up to. So it was like an opportunity to gather around a shared concern and a shared love and be with each other.

My name is Pamela Haines, she/her. I’m from Philadelphia and I attend Central Philadelphia monthly meeting. Thinking about minutes. It’s like, how do we move beyond having a common concern — having a common concern — to having that concern embodied? We had a plan. We had a three part plan. Let’s first connect over what we love about the Earth. Here’s a place that we can all kind of join in and kind of settle into that, that reason why we care. And then we wanted people to be able to share things that they’re pleased about because again, that’s something that hardly ever happens. People are always focused on what hasn’t yet been done. And I think that that just erodes our sense of what’s possible for us. So we knew we wanted to start first with that grounding and then with the what are some things that you’re actually doing that you’re pleased about? And only after that did we want to move on to “Well, you know, if you have a little more support or you were a little more courageous or you just kind of imagined…what might you do?”

The part about what could we do more started with one woman who lives in a poor part of the city and she just first out, “What I would really love to do is grow a forest in the ghetto.” And I’m thinking, my goodness, we’re on to the stretches. And so her thought was, “I would love to do that, but I can’t possibly.” We were able to kind of hold that and wonder together what might actually be possible. This one woman said, “I would like to get more courageous in talking with my family and maybe with people who have different, you know, different perspectives from me around what it is that I care about the cimate.” And I thought, I’m so glad that she said that, because that may seem like, you know, you should just do it or they’re hopeless or whatever. But she said, “That’s a growing edge for me.” And then we were able to back her in that. Somebody else wanted to be more powerful in her relationship with legislation. We have this very active Quaker action group, Earth Quaker action team (EQAT) that’s active in this region. And somebody was saying “Maybe I could…maybe there’s a role for me there.” So it was on a number of different fronts that people were imagining the possibility of doing more.

I think it’s really wonderful whenever we can find the space to allow that kind of open imagining of new possibilities to come out. It just seems like that’s a very nourishing soil in which new things can happen. So then of course we trying to think about, well, what next? We have this great thing and we we knew that some people would be supportive, but is there anything for the meeting that’s a next thing That’s so…it’s so hard to think about because so many people care about so many different aspects of any issue on the environment. Oh my goodness. people say, “Well, if we’re doing the environment, we have to address this issue…We really have to address this…This is the most important one… If we’re going to talk about the environment, we have to say this…”

But do we really? Do we really? You know, one of the things I am so passionate about (is) regenerative agriculture and one of the things that I’ve learned is that monocultures are bad news. If you’re trying to do all the same thing in one place, there’s going to be trouble. And then I was also thinking about diversity. You know, we’re not really interested in homogeneity here. So is there a way that we could really gather together all of that diversity and claim is all is ours?

A lot of times in meeting we put effort into trying to find a minute that everybody can agree with, a statement that we could make that everybody can unite around. So, that’s about what we think or what we know or what we care about. But what about… how do we embody that? How do we embody what we care about? And we embody it in all of our bodies? And what of all of our bodies and the way we all embody that caring could then become our corporate witness? I think that’s a very exciting idea. I keep thinking about that woman who said I want to plant a forest. Our meeting needs to claim her, her passion about this issue that needs to be part of it. We to claim all of our passions. And then, then we’ve really got something real. That’s what’s really, really real.

Discussion Question:

• What happened to allow you meeting to embody the concerns of all of its members?

The views expressed in this video are of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views of Friends Journal or its collaborators.