What is worth it?

One of the things I've been reflecting on is my relationship to Reclaiming and what I really want in a spiritual tradition.

I've stopped volunteering and taken myself off of all of the lists and stepped away from all the politics. Being just a person was so much easy - in so many ways. No politics to worry about, I didn't need to worry about offending anyone or working relationships. I just did exactly what I wanted to do.

I helped out when I wanted to and was available and didn't when I wasn't interested. I focused a lot on my son and making sure he got rest and sleep and engagement. I rested and recovered and connected with friends.

I did not go to meetings. I did not feel bad about not going to meetings.

I felt a lot more at choice in some ways. I didn't realize that I could let go so much and still be engaged in relationships. There's a hyper vigilance that seems to be calming down in my life. But I decided to not engage any of the D5 stuff or the all camp meeting or ritual planning or even showing up at rituals unless it served me.

If I'm seeking peace and calm and love, what does it take to have that? How does that engage my activism? I don't want to give up seeking the truth and seeking justice and alignment; I don't want fight any more. So I'm starting to seek a path that really serves all of me.

I don't know if that will be in Reclaiming, that tradition itself is a bit at war about activism and it's place in the tradition in some ways and so in that way the tradition is a match for where I find myself just now.

And there's a lot about transparency and inclusivity that do not get focus or time and that's hard for me. But if I'm not engaging the politics maybe that will continue to die down.

I also want more time for reflection and that's going to have to come from somewhere. At the moment I think that somewhere is teevee and internet time. I really want to get rid of cable teevee to be honest. I think it takes up far too much of household time. Internet as well. I can't get rid of it from the house because i work here, but some days I want to. Maybe I could unplug it on the weekends or something so that the focus comes back to the people and our development.

What this comes down to for me is that I don't have to leave Reclaiming as a practitioner, for now. Kiddo is talking about going to Ca camp in 2 years when he can and wanting to go to Wintercamp and to see Kilgore, Owen and Angela in the winter. Connecting with community is one of the things I've always wanted for Kiddo and he's loving doing it just as I've been having my crisis of community. And because of him I'm not leaving entirely. For now anyway.

But I am not volunteering for anything in the community. I am working in another community and that's more than enough for now.

Reclaiming: D5 and the Principles of Unity

If you want to read about the Principles of Unity and the changes to that, go here.

The facts the Abel writes about are accurate in terms of the PoU. I'm actually in agreement with the results.

What I realized is that it's not the PoU that's bothered me. Once folks started talking about being inclusive of all gender identities, I knew it would be fine. But the manfiestation part is still bothering me.

We are not currently any good at being inclusive in an actual manifest way. This was made really clear to me by the D5 organizers scheduling over Witchlets, one of the few camps that were actually within range of the event.

When I went on to think about it further, I reflected on my concerns all along about secrecy, lack of transparency which are the primary ways that the SF Bay Area piece of Reclaiming has used to deal with creating a barrier to accessing (and being involved in) leadership.

In the Bay, Reclaiming is run by the Wheel which makes administrative decisions. But the only people who ever get to know about those decisions are either the reps that come to the meetings or the people bringing a particular issue. The notes are not published anywhere. So even when there are notes, they might go to the reps to take to the cells that sent them. But folks that aren't doing much work or aren't on a cell never get to see what's happening.

That's true of many cells and of things like the CRAFT cell where it's gotten to the point that many people can't even figure out how to be teachers in Reclaiming.

When I've inquired about this i've been told that if we did publish things people would want a say and bad things could happen to the process. It would get mired down! Things would crawl or halt to deal with the tidal wave of comments and pushback from the community (or from some small but vocal subset).

As far as I can tell what's really going on is that people would want to talk about it, but because there is such a focus on secrecy rather than transparency leadership has not learned to have good boundaries and instead relies on people not knowing and slight of hand communication to protect it from the writhing masses who would as questions and want to be involved.

So instead of hierarchy, Reclaiming has secrecy. If we have the intent of creating and moving towards the world that we want to see.

For my part, I realized that my request to the organizers for confidentiality about our no-go mediation situation a while back was not the right thing. If more people had been involved or felt like they could speak up, we'd be having a very different conversation. I would have had more out right support and whether or not the date changed, there would have been more conversation about it and peer pressure might have made some changes.

I am still angry about it and I won't work on it again. And while I'm not sure if it was the right thing to cut off all of those friendships because of the terrible unrelenting pain that I was in, it's done and not one of them has asked to talk to me individually or wanted to pursue off line conversation. In fact not one of them contacted me personally to talk about any of it at any time, which for me is evidence that the friendships were just not that important to them. That's my upset and my reflection of friendships and relationships in Reclaiming.

So I want transparency and I want to do away with institutional secrecy. It just doesn't serve a community that claims that it's trying to change the world. Secrecy is a tool of oppression and violence and not something that I want to be part of.