(no subject)

[hermionesviolin]

I got bonus surprise Scott today, albeit briefly.  He was sadface to learn that I wouldn't be around this afternoon.  I teased him about calendar-keeping.  And got to be the bearer of the exciting news that GoogleCalendar recently improved the Recurrence feature.

I can't sit in on class tomorrow because they don't have any extra seats, but it'll be recorded.

He was going to invite me to Simchat Torah except I have Art Night class.  I told Roza tonight: "I'm going to be a lot more Jewish by the end of this year, aren't I?"

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Event went well.  Julia likened me to an "angel" at one point.  I'll have to watch the video of the panel discussions at some point as I had to be in and out a bunch.

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Before Sacred Eros tonight, Desmond said of me: "She's a writer; she takes words seriously."  A. asked me what I write.  I finally turned to Roza and asked her, "What do I write?"  She answered, "You write sermons," in a sort of "among other things" tone, and I said, "Thank you, that is in fact what I was looking for."  (I had discarded blogging as not the answer I was looking for, since I don't feel sufficiently like that's a What I Do; and porn fanfic, since I really don't do that anymore; and I was literally blanking.)

One of the things we ended up talking about was "radical hospitality," and people used various story-images to express how they understood that concept; I forgot how powerful that is.  At some other point someone said something about the tension of using Bible stories in a UU service, of are those stories going to be resonant for people who don't come from that tradition, and my immediate (unspoken) response was, "They had better be or else Christianity isn't worth much" -- by which I mean that the stories that make up the Story of our faith should be powerful, resonant stories that speak to people.

Edit: At some other point during Sacred Eros, I cited a bit from the "Happiness" sermon Molly recently reposted (though I was recalling it from memory -- my netbook's busted, recall -- so I talked about not being happy with "the way things are" from more of an externally-directed perspective, which I think is a little unfortunate because "Frankly, I think God wants us to grow" is a great idea):

“Frankly, I think God wants us to grow and for me, growth comes from conflict. And I am never happy with conflict. I guess underlying conflict is change—and if I were happy with the way things are in the world, I wouldn’t want to change them. Of course, if I follow my own logic, then I am probably not happy with change either.”

Comments

[lunabee34.livejournal.com]

But blogging *is* one of the things you do (one of the awesome things I'm grateful you do). Is it the term you're objecting to or something else?

[hermionesviolin.livejournal.com]

Aww :)

I feel like blogging is more intentional, more thorough, less interspersed with "catalog my day" blather -- I feel like what I do is journalling: recording stuff that I want to record/share, but with an uneven ratio around "stuff that's just me recording events of my life" versus "stuff that's actually of interest to other people," plus there's so much stuff I would like to post about that I never get around to.

[lunabee34.livejournal.com]

So blogging is more, "Here, have this mini-essay I wrote on this topic," and journaling is less focused.

*nods*

I don't know that I've ever used a verb to describe what I'm doing other than writing. And although other people sometimes refer to my lj as my blog, I always say lj. Hmmm. I wonder what that means.

[wisdomeagle]

We talked about growth and conflict a little at our retreat -- specifically how in organizing language we talk about "the world as it is" and "the world as it should be," and we had some trouble with the "should" there -- both because it takes some nerve to name what the Kingdom of Heaven looks like, and because some of us come from therapy backgrounds where we learn not to use "should" and "ought" language because of the "accept the things we cannot change" part of the Serenity Prayer.

(I wonder if I should email the person who had the strongest issue with it with that Serenity Prayer idea and maybe with some of the DBT stuff from my workbook... I know she's done a little DBT too.

[hermionesviolin.livejournal.com]

I think it was Pr. Lisa who in one of our first lunches together mentioned the "should" thing and said she didn't think it was necessarily useful to wholly excise it from one's vocabulary but to be attentive to when we're saying/thinking it and ask ourselves "why?"