HELLO PIGEONS,
I am at the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly in Columbus, Ohio, which turns out to be a great little convention city with lots of restaurants and good accommodations and a really wonderful market right across from the convention center that sells PIEROGIS, because this is a big city for Polish food. So I feel like my Baba is here feeding me, and that’s comforting.
What else is comforting is being around ministers who, when they say, “How have you been” I can say, “Crummy and depressed, actually” because we don’t have to do small talk. Being able to say that I have been depressed has been an excellent way to realize that I HAVE, in fact, been very depressed. I am quite slow on the up-take sometimes. I have fabulous intuitive witchy powers and intellectual clarity about things way before I know how I’m feeling. I am a slow feelings processor. Isn’t it helpful to have language for these things about ourselves? Such nice ways to say, “I’m a mess!”
Many of us are sponges for the pain of the world and I’m just one of them, and I have been forgetting to let Jesus and God and angels and saints and mostly God run the world and help me deal with the fiery hot waves of rage and despair that come over me too regularly, and it wouldn’t hurt if I didn’t obsessively follow every story of racist injustice and persecution of GLBTQ people and objectification, harassment, rape and murder of women every night, with a side of being objectified and harassed by idiot men on dating sites.
But I am getting my heart back here, surrounded by colleagues and doing good work with other liberal religious people who are in similar pain. At a Communion service last night, we started with a litany of lamentation and I started to have an actual feeling, which was good because I’ve been quite numb since the Orlando massacre.
It occurs to me that my advice about not filling your schedule with too many tasks is more urgent than ever: kids, we need the internal capacity to respond to all the trauma in the world, which seems to be far more constant than ever before in my memory. So make sure you leave space for whatever you need to do inside your heart and soul to keep up with these aggressive, violent, divisive times in our broken little world. Good God, waking up and learning that Britain voted to leave the EU was a massive shock. It’s a collective blow. British colleagues, please check in.
So here I am, feeding off of the energy of the convention, getting bad news in community and therefore bearing it better, and (because life is life) having fun with some purple lipstick that has been kind of fun. It’s Mac liner and lipstick in Heroine, topped with Nyx Liquid Suede Cream Lipstick (stays forevah) in Sway. I have had such joy in meeting more of you and laughing with you, and all the hugs have also been most welcome. I’ll be part of a panel this afternoon at 4:45 as one of the speakers for “Harnessing Wisdom: Bla Bla Bla Universalism” today, stepping in for the Rev. Parisa Parsa who couldn’t make it.
See you soon, on here or there or somewhere, but meanwhile, kiss of peace in purple lippy. MWAH!
