Embroidering the Truth

Spring buzzing up from the ground

2008-03-21T21:30:00.002-04:00

I came home from work this afternoon, the second day of spring, and noticed that there were strange little holes in the sparse grass area near the curb in front of the house I live in and more of the same in the scraggly garden--little holes with small piles of red dirt around them. And--OMG says my brain--bugs flying around.

I am no fan of insects, so I ran inside hoping not to be attacked, feeling myself start to itch as I irrationally imagined them under my clothes. I had a feeling that they might be termites, and I was getting ready to call my landlord (who lives upstairs) to spread my panic. But I started up the computer and fed the cats and did a little Google search which led me to find out that the flying things are ground bees. According to the information on that page, the bees don't sting unless you step on them or try to handle them, so that ramped down my panic by a bunch. Other commenters to the topic point out that with honey bee populations drastically decreased that these pollinators are a good thing, and of course that the pesticides you could use to kill the ground bees are harmful to people and other animals as well as insects.

So, I'm going to live with the bees until they decide it's time to sleep under the ground again. I'm working on other projects to get more connected with nature, too. I plan on doing some container gardening, growing veggies on my little back deck, maybe planting some pansies or something out front once the bees hibernate.

Something that I really enjoyed, back when I was active in the pagan community, was the connectedness I felt to the earth and the animal and plant world around me. Even in NYC, even walking through urban areas of Richmond, I could find a lot of joy in picking flowering weeds or finding a bright blue feather on the ground. I feel like I've gotten a lot more closed off since then. So, in exploring my spirituality, I'm striving to bring that part of me out again.

Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.

Oh yeah, that. :)

I'm a member!

2008-03-17T20:51:00.004-04:00

As of about half an hour ago, I'm officially a member of the UU church! This has made me feel unexpectedly excited and bouncy inside and smiley on the outside. I got a UU bumper sticker and promptly installed it on my back window. I've never had one of those black & white oval stickers before. So, huh. Now I guess I'm supposed to belong.

I made loose plans to meet another woman from my class at the rather dark and intense-sounding Tennebrae service that'll be held Friday evening. I've never been to anything like that before or even heard of it, but I decided I wanted to go when Rev. Alane talked about how it worked as a counterpoint to the Easter(ish) service on Sunday. Never having been a believer, I never got anything out of Easter service when I was a kid--other than a new dress. ;) But I feel like the dark service Friday evening and the light one Sunday morning could be really deep and spiritual regardless of belief.

A Chosen Faith

2008-03-16T22:04:00.003-04:00

So, I just finished reading A Chosen Faith by John A. Buehrens and Forrest Church. It was recommended to me as the best book to read as a new UU and seems to be the main book presented by the UUA for more in-depth discussion of issues as opposed to the other more outline-type books. I did enjoy reading it--it's beautifully written, both authors clearly being excellent writers, intelligent and thoughtful men.

But there's a big but--for a book acting as the introduction to a diverse faith, the authors are not diverse. They are both white men of extremely similar age. Both come from Christian backgrounds and seem to embody the Liberal Christian UU path, though they do have interests in other paths. None of those thigns are bad and none would bother me if this were a book by one author. But this is a book of essays, a format that by its very nature allows for multiple viewpoints.

Where is the book I want to see? I want a book of essays by women and men from various backgrounds, who came to Unitarian Universalism in different ways and followed different paths under the UU umbrella. I want to see a book of essays that wouldn't leave the reader with the impression that Unitarian Universalism is mainly a liberal branch of Christianity. I want to see a book that lets UUs who follow pagan or Buddhist or atheist paths tell their stories, a book that would be more welcoming and inspiring to people who don't come from a Christian background.

Maybe there's a book like this out there, and I'm just not aware of it. That would be awesome, really. I'm going to try to ask the minister about this at my class tomorrow night.

I am glad that I read the book, and I'll most likely go back and read parts of it again later. I learned a lot about the background of the church, and I read things that made me think and a few things that moved me. I do have great respect for the authors, I just also have respect for the great diversity at which their writing only gave me a glimpse.

Seven weeks of UU

2008-03-16T13:57:00.002-04:00

Today was my seventh consecutive week of attending the UU church services on Sunday. I'm pretty proud of myself, to bo honest, fo keeping up with it. It's not hard, though, because I really am enjoying it. I definitely feel more comfortable in the actual service part--I can meet and talk to people sitting near me, and the rhythm of the way the service usually proceeds feels familiar now. I still suck at socializing during the coffee hour afterward. I still usually leave after a few minutes, but that's something I know I need to work on.

Today, I was once again running too late to walk there, but after service I took a little walk up to the Carrillon--the big bell-tower monument to WWI. It's a gorgeous day outside today--sunny and mostly clear, and it's breezy and cool in the way that makes me feel alive and glad to be alive. At home, I fixed myself some lunch and then sat out on the little back deck eating it and reading A Chosen Faith. I'm down to the last section now, the final two essays. I plan to write more on this book once I finish it because I do have some thoughts both negative and positive.

Tomorrow evening is the last session of my New UU class, and I plan on becoming a member at that point. For some reason, I feel like I'll be more confident in social things once I know I'm a "real" member. Like, I'll have official proof that I belong there. I'll have a real printed name tag rather than a stick-on one with my name scribled in Sharpie. That's probably silly, but what can I say?

I'm still trying to figure out exactly what I should get involved in. I'm very interested in the UU Singers. I haven't sung in a group since middle school chorus, and that was 20 years ago, but I do think I have an okay singing voice, and I love to sing. I'd like to join one of the social responsiblity groups, but I'm not sure where I'd fit best. Some of them sound like they're best suited for people who don't work during the day, so that's not for me. I'm thinking about e-mailing the person in charge and asking her what she thinks would work for me, but I don't know if that's cool.

UU embroidery project

2008-03-07T21:19:00.005-05:00

I seem to have this process that I go through when I get deeply interested in something: I read about it, then write about it, then stitch about it.

I traced the design from this version of the chalice and flame and stitched it in cotton floss in four colors (the flame thread variegated) chosen to represent the four elements. It's mainly split stitch, withback stitch and stem stitch, nothing fancy, but I enjoyed doing it, and I think it'll look nice on my wall once I get it in a frame.

And blahblahblah about me

2008-03-04T19:24:00.003-05:00

Since I'm reasonably sure nobody is reading this yet, I don't feel bad about spamming with posts about me. I figure I should give some basics about myself in case anybody wants to know.

My name's Elizabeth. I'm 33, and I live in Richmond, VA. I mostly grew up in Bethlehem, PA, moved to Richmond with my family when I was starting high school, and then went to NYC for college and stayed for a little while after. I moved back to Richmond about 11 years ago, and just a few months ago I finally settled in an apartment that I really like. It's a two-bedroom, the first floor of a duplex. The house was a single family home when it was built around a hundred years ago, and it has some nifty details that, to me, totally make up for the wear and tear.

I'm a vegetarian. I'm single and have no kids--the no kids part is definitely the way I want it. I love animals, and I have two cats. Flash, my big gray and white boy, is about 7 years old and has been with me for almost four. He's FIV+ but in good health. Lexi is a very pretty calico--she's about two years old, but she looks more like a teenage kitten--and I adopted her about a month ago.

I have an ordinary sort of office job, but I enjoy it because I work in a very small and casual office that lets me have a good bond with my coworkers and also gives me greater latitude as far as my duties. I've been involved in media fandom for close to ten years now, intermittently writing fanfiction and attending conventions. My last big excitement was going to Chicago in November for a Supernatural (TV show) convention where I got to meet up in person with some friends from Colorado and have pictures taken with shockingly tall and handsome young men. *g*

So, that's me.

Something I wish

2008-03-04T11:17:00.006-05:00

I've been wishing that my family could have found the UU church when I was a kid. There is a UU church in the town I'm from in Pennsylvania, and it's been there for a long time. I'd never heard of it though, and I imagine my parents hadn't either.

My mom grew up Catholic (though attending public school), and my dad grew up Protestant. They got married in the Presbyterian church my dad's side of the family attended, and from what my mom told me that meant that she really couldn't go back to the Catholic church. She said that as far as they were concerned I was an illegitimate child, which made no sense to me. When I was very small--before school age, really--we went to the Presbyterian church, but none of us liked it very much. My mom didn't feel comfortable because the atmosphere wasn't at all what she was used to, and unbeknownst to me until much later my dad had become an atheist.

So, we stopped going to church. I'd go on occasion when I slept over at my grandparents' house, but it wasn't a regular thing. On the one hand, I'm grateful that I wasn't forced to go to a church that meant nothing to me, that I wasn't indoctrinated, that I had the space to decide what I believed. OTOH, I wish I hadn't had to do it all on my own, in a vacuum. I did have a couple friends in high school who would talk freely about religious and philosophical issues, but we never discussed anything like that in my family.

Also, I would like to feel more comfortable in a church environment. When I go into a church, I feel like an alien. I feel like I don't belong. I feel like I should not be there. I feel like I'm going to do the wrong thing. I feel like I constantly DO do the wrong thing.

The last time I went to a regular church was with my grandmother on Christmas year before last. I was up there visiting by myself, and it's pretty much impossible to turn down your sweet widowed grandmother when she asks you to go with her so because she doesn't like to go to church by herself on Christmas. We tried to go on Christmas Eve and got there at the wrong time. Service was already underway when we arrived, and it was a packed house. We stood in the back for a few minutes, and when the congregation recited something (the Apostles' creed maybe?) it deeply freaked me out. All those people saying it together, so rote, so flat. It gave me the shivers.

But I'm coming to feel more comfortable in the UU church. One good thing is that it's not much like a traditional church on the physical level--it's open and bright without the huge overwhelming whiteness of the Presbyterian church we went to. The seating is more relaxed. It's a good place. I think it would have been a positive thing for me and my family to have a place where we all could feel comfortable and meet people. And I think we could have been a good part of that kind of community.

The only thing I can do is go now, for myself.

Introductory post

2008-03-03T22:50:00.003-05:00

This past Sunday was my fifth time attending the First Unitarian Universalist Church here in Richmond, and today I went to the first session of the New UU class. In many cases, I can take forever to make my mind up about thing, but other times I know right away and my mind is made up. This is one of the latter--I knew immediately that I wanted to join.

I first found about the UU church about eleven years ago, shortly after I moved back to Richmond from NYC. Before I left New York, I had started getting into Paganism, and when I moved back to Richmond I started going to CUUPS services at the UU. The people I met there were my first new friends in Richmond, but after a while the interpersonal craziness got to be too much in combination with my own internal craziness. At the same time, I just wasn't comfortable with having such an intense reglion as part of my daily experience, so I dropped away from the pagan community.

I've got nothing against Paganism, nothing at all. Some parts of what I learned then are inside me for good, and I treasure them. I consider myself an Agnostic with both Humanist and Pagan leanings. The fact that all of those things fit under the UU umbrella makes me a happy girl.

My usual online home of sorts is Livejournal, where I have the same journal title. My activities there are mainly fannish (writing, squeeing like a silly girl, thinking deeply about TV shows, etc.), though when I first started it I named it for the hand embroidery that I was very much into doing at the time. The fun thing is that somehow this name/title works in many, many ways.

When my LJ was about crafting, I thought of "embroidering the truth" as referring to the fact that I was working on embroidering original mandala designs that spoke to the truths about me.
When I got pulled back into writing, I found that the title still fit--the idea of using words to borrow somebody else's created characters and embellish them is a lovely thing to me. And now, in my spiritual explorations, it still works because in the context of UUism I can join with other people in borrowing bits and pieces from various world religions and philosophies and embroidering them together to form our own personal truths.

I had to create this blog in order to keep from flooding my LJ with UU related posts. My brain just keeps wanting to visit the topic, and I need an outlet. I've got a lot more from the past couple months that I'd like to explore here, and I expect that I'll only find more things to think about as I contonue on this journey. Welcome to anyone who cares to join me!