News of Friends

Faith writes: "My daughter, Carin, is asking for Holding in the Light again, as she has several, unclear, new masses showing up, in her x-rays - might be scar tissue or new tumors. Thanks to all for the support!"

Minutes

Dear Friends,

The draft minutes for the January 2023 meeting for worship with attention to business are available at https://www.concordfriendsmeeting.org/2023-01-08_CMM_Minutes or via https://www.concordfriendsmeeting.org/Minutes_of_ConcordMonthlyMeeting

For corrections and/or clarifications of the minutes, please reply to Clerk, Concord Friends Meeting (clerk [at] concordfriendsmeeting [dot] org)

With love, and peace, and tenderness,

Mark Barker, co-clerk, Concord Monthly Meeting of Friends

YRE / Yard Sale, May 13

Winter is such a great time to clear up long simmering indoor projects.  Many tend to notice their excess "stuff" and how interior spaces are used.  Please keep the Yard Sale in mind as you do so.  If you have some special items please take photos of them and email to Elaine or Greg!

As you think about how else you can help us get ready for this grand event consider the following.

• Advertising / Public Relations
• Receiving, sorting and pricing
• Storage and transport of items for sale
• Loaning and configuring Easy-Up shelters
• Setting up on May 12th
• Selling
• Greeting and outreach to visitors
• Assisting the children's efforts
  • Kid's activities
  • Tours of the Meeting House
  • Prep and sale of food items
• Dismantling the sales area
• Transporting of unsold items just after the sale - preferably in trucks
• And there will be more as our planning continues

As you can see, we hope for this to be a community event; one that is not only fruitful, but lots of fun too. Please write or call Greg or Elaine with your thoughts and offerings.

Later we will have more information about the Asongas, the new Kenyan family that we will be helping support through these efforts as they work to rise from poverty.  Did you know that Christine Imbiti and her family have "graduated" from the program and are now self-supporting? Their news will also be coming our way soon.

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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