SUUSI, Day 3

[rivka]

Michael woke up early Tuesday morning for a flatwater kayaking trip. (His whitewater kayaking trip last year left him banged-up enough that he wasn't interested in repeating the experience.) I managed to get a quick shower in before he left, and then got Alex dressed and packed up for children's programming. My brilliant idea that morning was to attach the potty to her stroller with a bungee cord, so that I could get all the gear to the nursery single-handedly. bosssio and I took the kids to breakfast, and then brought them over to their programs. I had to kiss Alex goodbye on the top of her head, because she didn't even turn around to see me go.

A regular feature of SUUSI is 9am "Theme Talks," in which a different UU minister addresses the SUUSI theme each day. (This year's theme was "To Live Fully." Next year's is "Pilgrimage.") The talks are longer and more involved than a typical sermon, and they're not surrounded by the trappings of a worship service. An interesting addition this year was "talkbacks" every afternoon, in which people could argue aboutdiscuss the theme talk with the presenting minister. Talkbacks are fairly common at UU churches; it was nice to see them at SUUSI.

Tuesday's theme talk was amazing. It was delivered by Raleigh NC minister Tom Rhodes. I forget what the formal name of his talk was, because for the rest of the week I was paraphrasing it to people as, "Should We Ditch the Seven Principles?" Apparently - I didn't know this - the UUA's charter obligates them to review the Principles every so many years, and that process is underway now. Rev. Rhodes, who introduced himself as an "agnostic evangelist" - "reaching out to share with everyone the Good News that we don't know what's going on!" - suggested that while the Principles are fine moral statements, they don't really address the deeper questions that often lead people to religion. He acknowledged and unpacked the problems with coming up with shared theological positions for a creedless religion that includes a large contingent of atheists, and then dove right in and suggested some new theological Principles anyway: for example, that this world is the one that matters, and that "the line between good and evil is drawn down the center of each human heart." He was eloquent, inspiring, and downright provocative... just what I look for in a Theme Talk. It was great.

I had my first workshop scheduled for Tuesday at 10, and it was supposed to be in the dorm right next to ours. When I walked in at 9:55, I was met with a sign on the door explaining that my class had been moved to a building I'd never heard of, and which turned out to be all the way across campus. I was about ten minutes late, but I was hardly the last one to arrive. To add insult to injury, there was major construction occurring just on the other side of the wall from our new classroom. It was loud.

In lieu of my meditation class, which was cancelled, I had signed up for a storytelling class. Our teacher, Sula, was a Brazilian woman of Eastern European extraction who specializes in telling African folktales. She began the class by telling a legend about why the sky is so far away. Then she split us up into three groups, gave each group an assignment of what to pay attention to (characters, voices, movement), and told the same story again. We all took notes, and afterwards discussed our observations about her techniques as she added explanations and elaborations. This worked really well - it felt like a very efficient, concrete, and interesting way to pick up a lot of details about storytelling at once. Then she told us that we were all going to tell the same story. Each group was assigned a third of the story, and within the groups we were each given a slip of paper with an aspect to concentrate on. Mine was "nonverbal communication." I know it was random chance, but she couldn't have given me a more challenging assignment if she'd tried! We spent ten minutes or so studying our portions of the story. I felt really self-conscious trying to think of how I might use hand and body motions in telling my piece.

(Oh, that was an interesting sidenote: one of the things she told us is that storytelling practices are different in different cultures, and that you should plan to tell stories of a culture whose style works for your personality. Although she is Brazilian, she tells very few Brazilian folktales. She really loves African stories, which involve a lot of movement, gestures, and acting. She told us that her one attempt to tell Native American stories - in which the storyteller typically remains very still and uses only the voice to convey meaning to the audience - damn near killed her.)

After we'd had some time to prepare, we began telling the story. All of us who were assigned the first part went one after the other, which was fascinating - we'd each followed her lead and sort of improvised our own retelling of the written text, and although they all followed the same basic points they were also very different. After each person's performance she gave us feedback. I felt pretty good about mine! I didn't feel nearly as dumb trying to act out the story as I'd expected.

We broke for lunch before we'd had time to get too far into the performances; unusually for SUUSI, the class was to continue in the afternoon rather than on a different day. I raced back to the dorms to meet my father and go to lunch with him, and then rested a bit in my room before the afternoon session. In the afternoon we finished telling our portions of the folktale, and then she launched into the second half of the workshop: personal stories. Unfortunately, this part wasn't nearly as good. I felt like I learned so much about storytelling techniques in the first half. In the second half, she gave some general advice about personal stories, told some fairly pointless anecdotes all in a row without the discussion or analysis we'd had for the folktale, and then announced that we weren't going to have time to actually prepare and deliver personal stories - instead we were just going to talk some more. I was frustrated and bored. I'd hoped to learn more about how to tell personal stories: how to turn an incident into a story, how to figure out which details to include, and so forth. I wound up leaving about twenty minutes early, just because I was bored.

I picked up Alex and we spent some time playing in our suite with a bunch of kids from our suite and across the hall. We took an early dinner around 5pm, because Alex and I were signed up for an evening hike from 6 to 8:30. This one was called "Enjoy a Pretty Place," and I probably should've put "hike" in quotation marks, because it was really a gentle nature walk primarily aimed at families with young children. A full 30 of us went on the trip (including two guides), even though it was raining lightly as we set out. We drove about ten minutes from campus to a paved nature path through a little bit of wilderness that edged some fields - maybe a mile or so, round trip.

About 15 minutes into the walk, Alex started whining that she wanted to go inside to our bedroom. My attempts to distract her with flowers, berries, etc. were only partially successful. She had asked to ride in the backpack instead of walking, and in retrospect I think she was just kind of bored... or maybe hot, because I zipped a jacket on her when it started raining and she wasn't able to take it off when it stopped. (Nor would she let the kind Director of Religious Education hiking next to us to take it off her.) In order to keep my temper, I was reflecting her feelings back to her; it helped me stay calm and not snap at her, but it didn't seem to help her much.

Finally I took the frame pack off, against her vehement protests, and abandoned it by the side of the trail. We found a bench to sit on (another parent was resting there too, with an older kid) and let the group pass us by. She started perking up almost immediately, and after that the rest of the hike went really well. We took some side paths down through tall brush into open grassy areas, and Alex had a lot of fun running and playing there. One of our guides was a botanist, and kept pointing out things for the kids to see and learn about. Alex enjoyed learning flower names - she's big on names, right now - and I really enjoyed hearing his comments about the relationship between plants and wildlife, and having him explain what galls are and open one up so we could see the inside.

On the return hike, Alex walked up to an elderly woman and took her hand, beaming up at her sunnily. I was a bit taken aback (this is my shy, reserved, clingy child?), but the woman was delighted, and the three of us walked along together holding hands. When we came out of the woods into the fields, Alex was thrilled to discover a Japanese beetle on a milkweed leaf. She crouched down and watched it for some time, explaining to me that its name was "Cat." It was hard to tear her away. She kept saying, "I'm just going to peek at him ooooonnnne more time!" All in all, I guess it was only about 30 minutes of the two hours on the trail that were difficult, but at the time it seemed much longer.

Back at the dorm, I gave her a sponge bath at the bathroom sink and put her to bed. She fell asleep with no trouble at all. I signed out with the Childcare Co-op and went over to Cabaret, the nightly variety show featuring both professional and amateur musicians. I wanted to see Amy Carol Webb, and OMG was she amazing. She's always good, but she was in incredible form Tuesday night. She opened with her signature song, "I Come From Women":

I come from women tender as roses
I come from women strong as stone
And I come from women who taught me no one ever fights alone

Women of wisdom, women of tears
Women who stood and embraced their fears
Women of struggle, women not free
Women who passed the torch to me

At one point she had us all shout out the name of a woman who has given us strength, and I found tears in my eyes as I shouted. Her half-hour set (as long as they get, at Cabaret) was over too quickly. I listened to the next set too (Joe Jencks, a great folksinger in his own right) and then wandered back to the dorm, chatted with people for a while, and went to bed by midnight.

Comments

[redbird]

I like your agnostic evangelist.