Hello, readers! Yes, it's been a long time since I've actually written-written.
I had a really interesting conversation recently about writing, and not-writing, with another member of QUIP (Quakers Uniting in Publications). She's on the planning committee for our conference / program / annual meeting in early October, and we were talking about me maybe being on a panel there about blogging as a Friend. I am going to be on the panel! Yay!
First, about the QUIP gathering:
- Theme: Quaker Writing in these times of Crisis and Change
- Dates: Thursday, October 2 thru Sunday October 5
- Location: Residential at Pendle Hill Retreat Center, Wallingford PA USA and Online via Zoom
- More here: https://www.quakerquip.com/
Second: a couple of things that emerged from that conversation:
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Reading -- and writing -- for fun a lot less
As some of you know, I started in a grad school / post-grad certificate programme in counselling and psychotherapy in 2015. I decided I wanted to continue on through the diploma level to become what in the UK is called a qualified counsellor and psychotherapist. The only person in my life it seems like this was a surprise to was me, but, yes, I was surprised. Go ahead and laugh.
Anyway, after two training programmes that were kind of a brutal slog, three amazing placements, and several hundred additional hours volunteering at those same charities, I gt there. In 2023, I started my private practice, and also came on as a contractor with one of the charities I'd been involved with as a trainee on placement and then as a volunteer.
It turns out I really do love being a therapist. Huge thank-yous to everyone, and I do mean everyone, who helped me along the way.
I also trained in group work in 2024. That part really was zero surprise to anyone, including me. That was a wonderful experience, and it really helped heal some of the ick left from my core training.
Grad school, however, ate my life and my brain.
My capacity to read non-fiction absolutely dwindled during my training, and it's still very much reduced several years after graduating from my second programme! This is sad, because there are SO MANY cool non-fiction books I have in my To Be Read pile that I'm genuinely excited about, but have trouble sticking with. And I keep adding more.
Some of them are related to psychotherapy; one of them, by my friend, chemistry mentor, and fellow tea-lover Michelle Francl, is about the chemistry of tea; one of them is by fellow Baltimorean Ta-Nehisi Coates, whom I saw at the Book Festival recently and who greatly expanded my thinking about all sorts of things related to white supremacy and fascism and activism and more; etc, etc. I seem to manage articles a little better.
Wait, I did finish KC Davis's How to Keep House While Drowning. Which, thankfully, she did a really good job of designing to be accessible to ADHDers, depressed and anxious people, other neurodivergent folks, and anybody with executive function challenges.
(p.s. I clicked over to her website, and oooh, look at her more recent book! I really want this for both personal and professional reasons. I'm laughing: another one for the TBR pile!) (Yes, while writing this, I have in fact ordered it from Bookshop.org.)
But until my conversation with Finola, I hadn't realised how much my capacity to write had taken a hit from grad school. When I mentioned this to my partner, she seemed to think that was obvious. I took a break between my two professional diploma programmes, which ended up coinciding with the beginning of the pandemic, but aside from that, well, it turns out that having to write thousands of words over and over, very regularly, for... eight?... years excluding that small break... makes it hard to have the brain space to write, even for myself, much less for sharing with other people.
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So, the conversation with Finola, and the prospect of attending QUIP again, prompted me to think again about writing. A couple of things about this:
So... why do I blog, anyway?
One was when Finola was sharing what different QUIP bloggers had said to her about why they started their blogs. For some, blogging is all about drawing people to their books, for example. For others, it's about some other aspect of their ministry or their business -- consulting, speaking, facilitating events, etc. There are of course plenty of other reasons as well.
I started my personal blog when my wife and I moved away from the town I'd lived for my entire adult life so that she could return to grad school and change careers. Before other forms of social media, my personal blog and email were how I stayed in touch with folks from what was then home.
A few years later, I started my public blog, in no small part because I was tired of other people, especially other Quakers, deciding they knew The Truth about me as a Quaker Witch, and using the things they'd often outright made up, but decided were captial-T Truth, to discriminate against me.
I wanted my own voice to be out there with my own words, my own truth, my own experience.
It is perhaps ironic in this context that one of the things people used as "evidence" that they knew all about me is, in fact, that I co-authored a specific book. Which, to them, meant I was not a "real" Quaker, and it was somehow not discrimination... to discriminate... against me.
Sure, Jan.
Anyway.
I also started my blog as part of my ministry amongst Quaker Friends -- in answer to the need amongst Pagan Friends to build community; as a response to my own and others' spiritual need to find and be in community with each other.
At the time I started this blog, I'd had an active ministry amongst Pagan Friends for a little over a decade. I'd coordinated local events for Pagan Friends for years and helped others do the same; I'd facilitated interest groups at FGC Gathering and FLGBTQC Mid-Winter Gathering. The same year I started blogging, I co-organised Great Waters Pagan Friends Gathering and also facilitated my first week-long workshop for Pagan Friends at FGC Gathering.
(I just re-read the Great Waters epistle and found it, still, deeply powerful.)
So I started this blog as an extension of my ministry amongst Pagan Friends, and from my perspective as a Pagan Friend; but of course it also immediately reflected other aspects of my whole self, reflected other integral parts of my identity -- a Queer Friend, a disabled Friend, a Jewish Friend, and more.
So, this blog has always been primarily about my Integrity as a Friend.
A lot of things have changed in my life over the last decade, and certainly since I started blogging 18 (18!) years ago.
Perhaps of the biggest changes is a more recent one: I'm not trying to explain myself to other Friends any more. I'm no longer trying to persuade other Friends to be accept me or other minority Friends, or not to discriminate against non-Christian Friends, or LGBTQIA+ Friends, or disabled Friends.
These days, anti-Queer discrimination mostly comes out in discriminatory behaviours and attitudes towards trans Friends, since by and large most of the liberal unprogrammed Quaker communities I've been involved with in the US and the UK think they've overcome their homophobia, but there's a backlash allowing open transphobia.
The political and societal currents that are encouraging that backlash are using all of the exact same arguments that were used against gay and lesbian people in the 20th century, including earlier in my lifetime. (Bi people weren't believed to exist, much less ace or other queer people...) This is preparing the ground for backlash against the entirety of the LGBTQIA+ community as well. Though for now, some people really do seem to think these issues are somehow separate.
So, what does it mean to me to write now, as a queer, neuroqueer, part-Jewish, Quaker Witch?
I don't entirely know.
But I realised, in my conversation with Finola, that I'm excited to find out. I've got some real energy around this.
It's an unexpected and fun surprise.
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What do I, as a Quaker blogger and writer, have to say about what's happening in the world right now?
This year's theme is Quaker writing in these times of crisis and change. What do we, as Friends, have to say about what's happening in the world right now?
What do I have to say?
Much of the work I have been doing since October 7th, 2023, has been around Palestinian liberation and peace in Israel-Palestine.
In 2002, I served on two different peace witness delegations to Israel-Palestine, one explicitly Pagan, one explicitly Quaker. I spent time both in Israel and in several parts of the West Bank of the Occupied Palestinian Territories. I would now say, Occupied Palestine.
The current genocide in Gaza has prompted me to speak more, again, from that experience.
Most people in the US and the UK have absolutely no idea about the reality on the ground. That trip obligated me to share about what I experienced and what I witnessed, and I am able to speak from lived experience most people in the US and the UK don't have. Combined with my white privilege, conditional as it is for white Jews, I can speak, and sometimes be heard, in ways a lot of Palestinian-Americans can't.
So I started out by talking a lot more, again, about the Occupation.
But another thing the genocide has prompted me to do is to claim my Jewish identity in ways I have never felt able to before.
I've joined Na'amod, "a movement of Jews in the UK seeking to end our community’s support for Israel's occupation and apartheid, and to mobilise it in the struggle for freedom, equality and justice for all Palestinians and Israelis".
This is hands-down one of the best things I have ever done for myself as a Jew. It's one of the most important things I've done for my own integrity -- both in the sense of wholeness, and in the sense of truthfulness. That's both very Quaker and very Jewish.
It's also really changed, and charged, my peace activism.
And while it turns out many of our members struggle with not feeling "Jewish enough," and we regularly run sessions for members on this, I have also never felt as certain of my Jewish identity as I do amongst other Na'amodniks. It's a home in a way that part of myself has never had before -- though I had a closely-related experience at Shabbat with other Jewish Friends at FGC Gathering.
Initially in the conversation with Finola, I had been thinking that what I as a Friend have to say in this current time doesn't have nearly as much weight as what I as a Jew have to say in this time.
But the truth is they're not separable. So we're coming back to that theme of Integrity.
And we're coming back to my activism, but also to my writing here, in its wholeness.
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More blogging?
I've got at least one other piece, possibly two, brewing that might emerge before the conference. We shall see.
But I have to say, writing today has been not only deeply satisfying, but fun.
Meeting a spiritual need of my own, again.
I hadn't thought of that. Maybe I hadn't recognised, before, my need to write as one of my spiritual needs.
Now, as a therapist, I'm reminded of an extremely useful chapter, "The Counsellor's Use of Self", in Mearns and Thorne's foundational text Person-Centred Counselling in Action. I come back to this chapter every so often; I recommend it to other counsellors, including trainees.
I'm used to the concept of journalling as part of this self-discipline and meeting one's inner needs.
Writing that other people might read -- free of the need for approval, but with the invitation to community if others are so led -- is not something that I'd thought of that way before today.
But I'm thinking of it that way now.
I look forward to finding out what's next!
