Keeping Hope Alive

[Candle Flower, Arum italicum]

It gets more and more difficult to hold hope for this organization.

On Sunday night, we had the most spectacularly unproductive meeting I've seen in recent times. It felt completely dominated by power games and refusal to listen to each other. We weren't even trying to make big decisions, but mostly to collect agenda items passed down from Great Circle and prioritize them for handling in other committees and future meetings.

It is the first time in at least a year that this committee wasn't able to finish its agenda. (...or even begin it, really. This has almost never happened.)

I still hold a tiny flicker of hope that this was a fluke and not the intended result of flooding the committee with new people. This meeting did not reflect the ordinary way that we conduct business. It did, however, fall directly in line with the story that our consensus process doesn't work. I find it interesting that the people who have told me that story are the same people who have assumed a key role in making it real.

For now, I'm calling it a coincidence and remaining hopeful that we can get back on track. Perhaps we could avoid this situation by trying a new policy: when joining a new committee for the first time, a person might take a passive role by listening to how that committee conducts its business before jumping in to tell the group how to run things.

On the other hand, I'm excited about the land meeting today. We are consistently able to get through huge agendas with many people and keep each other informed and plugged into dozens of projects every week. I guess this is what frustrates me so much about these other committees - I know it doesn't have to be like that.

On the weaving front, I am working my butt off to get caught up. The gathering season has been especially taxing and set me behind by a few dozen yards. I should be caught up in a couple of weeks. Then I have to draw a boundary with this community: I must step away regularly and get my work done. We now have six caretakers to spread out the workload. I need to take some time every day for my weaving in the same way I take time every day for bookkeeping, meetings, and other sanctuary responsibilities.