Who is Riding on Your Shoulder? by Catherine Tylke
An Economy for Survival by Gill Westcott
In the Sea by Alison Mitchell
Reflection on the Quaker World Plenary 2024 by Stevie Krayer
Ubuntu by Wendy Pattinson
There’s a Hole by Sandra Dutson
Regenesis: Book Review by Kathryn May
A Dream of the Great Coming Together by Jo Cooper
Fifteen years ago this week, Woodbrooke held a conference at Friends House on “Zero Growth Economics”. Speakers included Alastair McIntosh, who asked whether we are called to be hospice workers to humanity and the planet in a dying process, and Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who suggested that perhaps we are to be midwives to the birth of something new. This tension - how much attention and care to give to the dying order and how much to the possibility of the new - is ever present. We can certainly see it in our national institutions but it is also at play in our Quaker community, both nationally and locally.
Alastair McIntosh spoke of our role as a faith community to exercise a deep holding of the issues, to exercise discernment, no matter how painful. In 2011, Britain Yearly Meeting committed to becoming a “low carbon sustainable community”. Thirteen years on, there have been many attempts to galvanise Quakers in Britain, including from Friends involved in civil disobedience and those campaigning for Stop Ecocide. But somehow, as a yearly meeting community, we are not able to sustain our deep holding of the Earth crisis.
We timed this EarthQuaker to allow Friends to send reflections on Britain Yearly Meeting held this July and the Friends World Committee for Consultation World Plenary a week later. Nobody wrote about Yearly Meeting, which agreed to changes in our governance but did not work through the discord relating to past commitments on gender diversity and on the climate crisis. We received several contributions prompted by the World Plenary, which was on the theme of “Living in the spirit of Ubuntu” and perhaps managed a bit more of that deep holding.
So, in this issue we have expressions of hope, in poetry and prose, inspired by the examples of Friends around the world and by African and Indigenous People’s voices in Extinction Rebellion. We also have a sense of the difficulty of the journey, of sadness and exasperation at the world’s slowness in embracing the need for change, and of the ways we are caught up in the structures, cultures, and psychologies of oppression. We are reminded that hope can grow from action. And there are examples of steps that can be taken, from tending a forest garden to creating and supporting social enterprises.
Part of the journey of transformation is becoming and staying conscious of the “voices on our shoulders”, noticing which of our thoughts and actions give life, and which serve to oppress us or others. This might be a kind of hospicing, allowing the Light to show us our personal and collective landscapes of trauma and injustice, and learning how we are situated in the landscapes of others. Perhaps, in accepting where we have come from, we may be released to new life and right relationship.
Laurie Michaelis
on behalf of the EarthQuaker editorial team