Meeting for Business this Sunday

Advance documents for Meeting for Business this Sunday follow.  If the documents do not open when you click the link, check your download location and open them there: Report of the Ad Hoc Committee on Land Purchase, Property Committee Report, Finance: Results of Operations, Finance: Balance Sheet, December Minutes, Child Safety Policy

This Sunday YRE is asking the Meeting to update the Child Safety Policy.  The change is to allow for Zoom remote observers. Detailed implementation steps are included in the document.

News of Friends

Paula Werme has written an Op-Ed piece regarding the need for reforms in NH family law and the courts. The Union Leader published it and you can read it here.  Joanna and Michael Evans have written to us offering New Year's greetings.  They are doing well out in Peru, Nebraska and wishing Concord Meeting Friends all the best.

Floor Care

We are at that time of the year that our floors take a beating.  You can help the cleaners and help to delay replacement costs by putting on slippers or indoor shoes when you arrive at Meeting.

YRE / Yard Sale

This spring we are planning a yard sale / bake sale / children's activity event at the Meetinghouse for community outreach and fund raising. The fund raising aspect is to fund continuing support of children and families in Kenya.  For the past 10 years we have contributed to the education of Christine Imbiti and the well being of her family in Kakamega. We expect this to be a true community building experience for the entire meeting.  We hope everyone can save the date once it is announced and begin setting aside items of value that you no longer need. Get ready for a fun time!

Kitchen Clean Up

A few people have replied that they will help in a rotation for Kitchen Clean-Up on 2nd and 4th Sundays.  We're trying to get this into a regular schedule so that everyone can relax with the knowledge that all has been planned for. We are sure there are regular attenders who would like to be of service in this way but have simply not noticed the need or have forgotten to reply. If you would like to help out in this way please reply to this message and we can work out the details with you. Thank you.

Happy New Year - A Reflection

Regardless of your thoughts about celebrities and wealthy travelers into space, I commend this excerpt from William Shatner's “Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder,” co-authored with Josh Brandon.  The New Year offers us the chance to make resolutions and dedicate ourselves to fulfilling them, and it is certainly true that every "New day, year, moment" offers the same chance. The closing sentence in the excerpt below goes to the heart: "If we seize that chance."  - Greg

We got out of our harnesses and began to float around. The other folks went straight into somersaults and enjoying all the effects of weightlessness. I wanted no part in that. I wanted, needed to get to the window as quickly as possible to see what was out there.

I looked down and I could see the hole that our spaceship had punched in the thin, blue-tinged layer of oxygen around Earth. It was as if there was a wake trailing behind where we had just been, and just as soon as I’d noticed it, it disappeared.

I continued my self-guided tour and turned my head to face the other direction, to stare into space. I love the mystery of the universe. I love all the questions that have come to us over thousands of years of exploration and hypotheses. Stars exploding years ago, their light traveling to us years later; black holes absorbing energy; satellites showing us entire galaxies in areas thought to be devoid of matter entirely… all of that has thrilled me for years… but when I looked in the opposite direction, into space, there was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold . . . all I saw was death.

I saw a cold, dark, black emptiness. It was unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth. It was deep, enveloping, all-encompassing. I turned back toward the light of home. I could see the curvature of Earth, the beige of the desert, the white of the clouds and the blue of the sky. It was life. Nurturing, sustaining, life. Mother Earth. Gaia. And I was leaving her.

Everything I had thought was wrong. Everything I had expected to see was wrong.

I had thought that going into space would be the ultimate catharsis of that connection I had been looking for between all living things—that being up there would be the next beautiful step to understanding the harmony of the universe. In the film “Contact,” when Jodie Foster’s character goes to space and looks out into the heavens, she lets out an astonished whisper, “They should’ve sent a poet.” I had a different experience, because I discovered that the beauty isn’t out there, it’s down here, with all of us. Leaving that behind made my connection to our tiny planet even more profound.

It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered. The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness. Every day, we are confronted with the knowledge of further destruction of Earth at our hands: the extinction of animal species, of flora and fauna . . . things that took five billion years to evolve, and suddenly we will never see them again because of the interference of mankind. It filled me with dread. My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral.

I learned later that I was not alone in this feeling. It is called the “Overview Effect” and is not uncommon among astronauts, including Yuri Gagarin, Michael Collins, Sally Ride, and many others. Essentially, when someone travels to space and views Earth from orbit, a sense of the planet’s fragility takes hold in an ineffable, instinctive manner. Author Frank White first coined the term in 1987: “There are no borders or boundaries on our planet except those that we create in our minds or through human behaviors. All the ideas and concepts that divide us when we are on the surface begin to fade from orbit and the moon. The result is a shift in worldview, and in identity.”

It can change the way we look at the planet but also other things like countries, ethnicities, religions; it can prompt an instant reevaluation of our shared harmony and a shift in focus to all the wonderful things we have in common instead of what makes us different. It reinforced tenfold my own view on the power of our beautiful, mysterious collective human entanglement, and eventually, it returned a feeling of hope to my heart. In this insignificance we share, we have one gift that other species perhaps do not: we are aware—not only of our insignificance, but the grandeur around us that makes us insignificant. That allows us perhaps a chance to rededicate ourselves to our planet, to each other, to life and love all around us. If we seize that chance.

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