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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.
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.
