...in the seedy streets immediately around the North Campus area of NAU. I think I was looking for street parking so that I could visit the Parking Administration building, which, ironically, didn’t have any parking spaces nearby.
Anyway. I happened to walk by this non-descript little white cinder block building that I’ve driven by a zillion times, and I noticed that it was an outpost of the Society of Friends, of all things. Way back in the day, I attended a Quaker elementary school, which was actually kind of awesome…Quakers are good folks. And while I’m not a Christian, or religious, or even particularly spiritual except in the most amorphous and whimsical sort of way, I do remember the Quaker meeting thing. From grade one through grade six, I went and sat quietly with the rest of the school for forty-five minutes on Wednesday mornings, and one of the things one learns from doing that is how to be quiet, and how to be comfortable with one’s thoughts, and all that. It’s a sort of meditation, but a really cool sort of meditation because the experience of it is of being still and being quiet, and doing that in the same place as a whole bunch of other people who are there to do the same thing. It’s not exactly a collective thing, but not exactly solitary either, and that’s pretty nifty.
At least, that’s how I think about it now. And these days it’s kind of difficult for me to be quiet and still in my brain, and I tend to be surrounded by people who don’t seem to like or respect or value or understand what is valuable about being quiet and still. And I’m feeling like I could use some of that. So.
So I think one of these Sundays I’m going to try and make it down there at 10am (kind of a tall order for me), and see how it feels to be back in that particular space again. See if it still works for me, see what the scene is like. From what I understand, Quaker meetings behave rather differently from place to place. While there’s not supposed to be a minister or what have you (one of the cool things about the Quakers…they have this notion of democratic worship), some are more scripturally based and more hierarchical than others. I also can no longer get behind the notion of pacifism under all circumstances…I can respect it, but I also have to respectfully disagree. So that might be a problem, and if there’s too much Jesus in the whole thing, frankly, that too might be a problem.
But the Quaker ritual, so to speak, is pretty neat in its theory and, in my experience, its practice, and in retrospect a lot of what I learned that has made it possible for me to survive some of the harder things I’ve encountered in my life has been that ability to be quiet with my thoughts, and I learned it on those Wednesday mornings when I was little. So I think it’s worth checking out, at the very least…see if that all agrees with me, and is useful, in that particular form and mode of expression, in 2007.
We shall see…
