It seems good to reflect on the intervening space between the Woodbrooke 2023 Climate Justice Gathering and the Quaker Earthcare Gathering. I am convinced that the interim time and the time to come is a continuum, we’ve chosen to be on it together. Maybe we are walking together on a mountain path, not taking the direct steep path but experiencing the whole mountain, the north, east, south and west faces, walking on shallower inclines, sometimes taking side paths as we each follow our curiosity, our necessity. It’s definitely about the journey not the summit, it’s definitely about travelling together, not alone, at this point in these times.
At the last gathering I didn’t know about Living Witness, nor the Quaker Support for Climate Action (QS4CA) What’sApp group. The only Friend I knew was Wendy P. Wendy is knowledgeable on food and nowadays vegan food. The last time I saw her, earlier this year, she sowed some more seeds with me and they’re growing nicely. As I move towards a vegan diet, it’s because she’s gently informed me, not lecture style or by persuasion but by showing me. And at last I’m getting it and I’m convinced that the germination period is a necessary one, it’s starting to feel as if it’s not that hard to change. I’m allowing myself to choose the pace I can manage and as I develop a deeper relationship with Wendy (we know each other very well already) I want to honour her wisdom.
Thanks to many recommendations for reading at the last gathering (Braiding Sweetgrass) and often on QS4CA, there is much I now know that I used not to know and that means I have new insights to embed and to act on. I already knew a lot of the science and the political/economic/social/behavioural barriers to change but now I know a bit more about indigenous wisdom especially from The Eternal Song film and reading the White Supremacy web book with Jo C. I am still working through revelations on fear and safety and on the tendency to think there is “one right way”. It feels freeing rather than onerous - ubuntu with a spring in my step.
I learnt from Phil as we travelled home from the last gathering that he’d studied the course I used to tutor at the Open University (Environment: Journeys through a Changing World) and it was good to start to think about activism. We each can listen to our own calling, and once you know it, take one step at a time and don’t compare with other’s callings - the point is to follow your own calling. So that’s taken me on the Restore Nature walk last year and then to the first Climate Action Network (CAN) vigil in Parliament Square earlier this year. I know I’m not a protester generally, but I want to be a supporter and find I can. It just so happens that I’m on Quaker Peace and Social Witness Central Committee, and because of that I attend Meeting for Sufferings (MfS), and it seems handy to be in those places, being able to say what I know and what I’m learning about from our space here. It is important for us all to speak to our Area Meeting reps on MfS to make the activism stories known when climate justice is on MfS agenda and it was timely before Yearly Meeting. And we have that germ of an idea to be travelling in ministry, sharing our different stories more widely in our Quaker community.
Another opening up for me was Paul’s session online where many of us cut up a £5 note and again the white supremacy learning came to mind. At first I found the task difficult because my society has embedded in me a high respect for money, for its worth and what it can do and how wrong it would be for me to cut into the picture of our monarch and how much more use could be made if I gave it to a homeless person. Having worked on homeless projects, I know often the harder thing to do is to be loving and caring. Ubuntu again.
Shall we bring our cut up money to the Gathering transformed into something more beautiful than money, shall we make them and bring them or bring the errant pieces together as one piece of art and send our artwork to someone in power as our collective story?
Most important of all, being in Living Witness Meeting for Worship (MfW) every Monday and Friday morning is priceless. Being in a MfW with others who all care about the Earth, who know the depth of chaos that is before us and who want to be a nurturing community holding a space for prayer and action is both precious and awesome.
Sue Curd