Last Day during My Sabbatical

As mentioned in my last post, I've been blessed to be able to take the summer off of paid work. Well, I had a lot of unpaid work to do, so it's not like I didn't keep busy. I did get to eat a few bonbons -- actually, ice cream and donuts more than bonbons. But I didn't blog as much as I had hoped. So be it.

Today, 9/25/11, was my last day before I go back to full-time work. It was a full day.

I went to Bible study at Green Street Friends Meeting. It was led by Walter Hjelt Sullivan. (It was thanks to Walter that Robin and I found a place to rent in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia, close enough to walk to Green Street Meeting. He and his wife Traci live a block away, and he heard about the house where we moved. We knew them from when they were co-directors at Ben Lomond Quaker Center near Santa Cruz, Calif.)

Walter chose Ephesians 6:10-17, about the armor of God. It was offputting to some Friends, but I thought it was a great reminder that God gives us the strength and the tools -- spiritual weapons, even -- to meet challenges and, yes, even evil. "Stand firm," the text says; it sounds just like George Fox. I was reminded of something another parent told me this week at a school soccer game, when he was picking up plastic shopping bags blowing by: "Be an upstander, not a bystander!"

Then meeting for worship, where I was mulling over the armor of God, breastplate of righteousness, and so on in a contemporary context. Perhaps this: Put on the bicycle helmet of carbon footprint reduction, the bulletproof vest of faith, the organic cotton t-shirts and shorts of righteousness, and the sweatshop-free sneakers of peace. (I'm not sure what the sword of the Spirit would be.) This train of thought did not quite rise to the occasion of standing and delivering it as vocal ministry.

Afterwards, Robin & I had a nice chat with a fellow parent of an 8th grader at our sons' school. Then we headed home, where after lunch I helped Robin get to the SEPTA train to connect with Amtrak to a conference on fundraising for Quaker organizations (she tweeted this from the Amtrak train).

At home, Younger Son wanted to watch "Santa Claus is Comin' to Town" on DVD (we don't have TV but we have a computer, and we only own a couple of DVDs, so...). Then we went outside to do yard work while Older Son did homework.

Here's what Younger Son found in the grass:

And here are the non-motorized, carbon-footprint-reducing tools we used on the lawn and edges:

And here is Younger Son, still smiling after working:

Scrambled eggs for dinner, followed by washing two nights' worth of dishes, a blog post, and hustling the boys to showers and to bed. A truly satisfying day to end a truly blessed time. I am grateful to my sons, my wife, our new and old friends, and the Spirit for allowing these many blessings to flow.

Last Weekday in My Sabbatical

I've had the blessing of being able to not work for three months during our move from San Francisco to Philadelphia so Robin could be executive secretary at Friends World Committee for Consultation (FWCC) Section of the Americas.

That changes on Monday, 9/26/11, as I start a new job in Center City doing fund development for the Community Design Collaborative, a community design center that provides pro bono predevelopment design services to nonprofit organizations, offers unique volunteer opportunities for design professionals, and raises awareness about the importance of design in community revitalization.

I am still hoping to post about the cross-country drive I took with our boys this summer. Meanwhile, I have been baking quite a bit, as well as making family dinners. Here is what I did today to mark the end of my free time.

Step 1 doesn't look too great on first glance:

But then, oh then, order appears from chaos:

Cookies in the oven, gonna watch 'em rise! Cookies in the oven, gonna watch 'em rise!

They turned out to be quite tasty, though quite soft. My suspicion is that the oven runs a little cooler than indicated. Robin thinks the extremely high humidity today is responsible.

In any event, I am truly blessed to have had this summer off from paid work. Thank you, God, from whom all blessings flow. Of course, I still had plenty of work to do, it just wasn't paid for with cash. And I certainly had the opportunity to touch "that which is eternal" at times in the process.

Board Binder

Among the transitions I've made this summer, in moving from San Francisco to Philadelphia, I also took on a new volunteer role: clerk of the Board of Trustees of Friends Publishing Corporation, the publisher of Friends Journal magazine.

I know it's un-Quakerly to say it this way, but here's my new favorite status symbol, which came in the mail today:

I'm excited and honored to be a part of the organization. With Gabe Ehri as the new Executive Director and Martin Kelley as new Editor, the organization is ramping up its online presence.

I hope you already subscribe. If not, click here. Or, choose the new digital subscription and save paper & reduce mailing costs. Also, letters will be going out to Friends meetings about student subscriptions shortly. If you know a student who could benefit, please consider this.

Be sure to look at the recently published list of focus topics for 2012 and 2013.

Finally, there will be an event at the Arch Street Meetinghouse in Philadelphia on October 1, 2011, to celebrate and appreciate Susan Corson-Finnerty and Bob Dockhorn, who are both retiring this year after many years of service to the Journal. (Email celebration -at- friendsjournal.org to learn more; replace "-at-" with "@".)

I look forward to serving alongside my fellow Board members and the staff to continue this ministry of Quaker communications and outreach.

Sound of Way Moving, though Stuttering a Bit

In spare moments, I reflect on many small aspects of our family's move this summer from South San Francisco, Calif., to Philadelphia, Penna.

The first part of the summer was magical. Getting everything packed was a challenge. The boys finished school June 8, we had packed a lot but certainly not everything when we left June 10 for Santa Barbara, where there was a family sendoff. Then Robin flew to Philadelphia to start her job with Friends World Committee for Consultation Section of the Americas (FWCC), while I left the boys at Camp Avocado (aka Camp Grandma & Grandpa -- they have an avocado orchard) and headed back to South San Francisco to finish packing.

Then I went back to Santa Barbara to pick up the boys, and we headed east, stopping first in Las Vegas to see our good Friend Jennifer C. and family. I've posted some photos to Facebook, and that's about as far as I've gotten in processing the trip for myself, let alone others.

It went really well, and was a special and memorable time. I didn't manage to blog as we went, so I've been hoping to summarize it at least for myself now that we've been here a while.

Yet I haven't had the bandwidth -- psychologically or, until recently, technologically -- to take time to compose any kind of coherent reflections, even for myself let alone for my blog. For one thing, there's been all the tasks that go with moving house across country and establishing one's legal identity, finding services, etc., while also making sure 13 Year Old and 9 Year Old have at least their minimum daily requirements met.

Our 8-year-old laptop -- our one and only home computer -- perished on the last day of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, July 31. After a while, I bought a replacement, a much better machine at half the price of what we paid for the old one.

So, the last few days I've been taking time to set things back up on the new machine. Today I got back an external hard drive from the repair shop, where they were at least able to save the data. Yes, we had backups, but they were incomplete and on different media (CDs, online storage), none of which was ample enough to hold it all. So better to get the external drive and use that consistently.

Ironically, when I was in the middle of writing the paragraph about the laptop crashing, our home Internet connection dropped out. So, even now bandwidth is a precious commodity not to be taken for granted. (Especially this week, when Verizon workers are striking to preserve some of their benefits, at a time when, I understand, top execs are very high earners and profits are high.)

Somehow, this is how my life has seemed since we got to Philadelphia -- fragmentary, disjointed, full of (summer) light and heat, few clumsy moments and dropped connections, along with fun trips, cicadas, big trees, historic buildings, and some especially hot weather... Yet it has felt right and good to be here, in support of Robin's post as Quaker diplomat with FWCC Section of the Americas.

And even though I may not notice it as much as I could or should, God has been smoothing the way for us all summer, so far, laying low the hills and filling the valleys that have inevitably arisen. Perhaps it's all the people who have been praying for Robin and also our whole family. Thanks, everyone.

Arthur Larrabee's Quaker Model for Leadership

I'm at Philadelphia Yearly Meeting summer sessions for the first time. It's comfortingly similar to Pacific Yearly Meeting, though with some striking differences I'm still thinking about. Meanwhile, here is a summary of the talk by Arthur Larrabee, General Secretary for PhYM, on the Yearly Meeting's theme this year, "Powerful Beyond Measure: Trusting the Call to Leadership."

Arthur Larrabee’s Top Six Recommendations for Quaker Leaders

as delivered at evening plenary to Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, 7/29/2011

1. Think globally about your meeting (or organization).
What is God’s big idea for us? Take time for retreat & reflection. Consider not just the temporal health but also the spiritual health. Consider our diversity and our oneness.

2. Share with us the fruits of your big-picture thinking.
Then release those thoughts back to the meeting. By releasing, we welcome the Spirit to come among us.

3. Take risks.
Be vulnerable in service to the meeting. Ideas and truth will inevitably trigger resistance. We need leaders to be fearless. Don’t fear rejection of ideas. Accept the result either way with equanimity.

4. Be spiritually grounded.
We expect you to be Spirit-led and open to the Spirit.

5. Test and season your ideas with the community.
The community’s temporal and spiritual input is necessary for discernment. The Quaker model is not the “power over” model of leadership.

6. Find primary satisfaction as a leader in the success of your meeting or organization.
We don’t expect you to be egoless or not want recognition of your gifts and skills. However, we expect you to measure your success by the success of the community.
- - -
To conclude, Arthur said, “Quakers have always had leaders… We need to be clear about what we expect of our leaders. With shared expectations, we’ll know what will make for trustworthy leadership."

A San Francisco Elegy

We're in process on our cross-country move. Robin is in Philadelphia -- in fact, she had her first day on the job at FWCC, also yesterday. And meanwhile, our children are at Camp Grandma & Grandpa while I finish packing.

Yesterday I got to spend some time in San Francisco while waiting for some car maintenance to be completed. It was a beautiful day to explore the southern Mission and lower Bernal Heights. Finally some bright Northern California sunshine, air relatively clean from all the rain, and no fog, yet still pleasantly cool.

First, I went for coffee, snack, and wireless at the Nervous Dog.

Then, I took a walk. It was getting toward lunchtime. Some friends had told us about Phat Philly, a Philadelphia-themed restaurant on 24th Street near Mission, so I decided to wander up there.

I went over to Guerrero Street, the route by which we drove our kids to school every morning. There is a relatively new "parklet" there that was created by closing off part of a little-used, diagonal intersection. It looked interesting from a moving car, so it was nice to actually partake of the walkability of the site by walk.
Along the way, I found Pi.
Open every day at 3:14 PM! And hated on Yelp:
And then, there it was: Phat Philly!
I had a pepper steak. It wasn't perhaps "authentic" in that they had gourmet steak, and they had veggie options available, which is great. They did have lots of ketchup available (as well as Tapatio hot sauce for that California touch), a Pennsylvania baseball team on TV (though it was the Pirates), and Tastykakes!! I used to bring a Tastykake krimpet in my school lunch almost every day when I was in grade school in New Jersey.
Lunch bag in hand, krimpet-less today, I went back to the parklet. The plaza there has some benches as well as a few chairs and a couple of eucalyptus logs.

I ate my lunch and finished reading David Byrne's Bicycle Diaries. It was fun reading about NYC's bold steps to make the streets more bicycle- and pedestrian-friendly while sitting in a San Francisco example of a similar effort.

Across the street is the fabulous Mitchell's Ice Cream. Yum! But not this time.

After lunch I wandered aimlessly along Mission Street for a while. This stretch of street has chain stores (Safeway and Walgreens), Spanish-speaking attorneys, affordable housing, market rate housing, a gas station, car repair shops, a hardware store, little grocery and liquor stores, money-changing places, lots of taquerias of Mexican, Salvadorean, or Guatemalan persuasion, a panaderia (Mexican bakery), yuppie coffee shops (Nervous Dog), a Cambodian restaurant, a Pizza Hut and two Indian restaurants -- one of which is also a pizza joint! In short, a higgledy-piggledy, thriving, mixed-use and mixed-income urban neighborhood.

This was written into the concrete near the Nervous Dog:
An appropriate term for contemporary postindustrial capitalism, in my opinion.

From there, I chose to rise the actual heights of Bernal and walked a block up the hill. To my delight, there was a mini-park on Coleridge.
There was a small playground and a nice walkway with benches and shade:
And it all opened up on a spectacular view west, toward Noe Valley, the Castro, and Twin Peaks:
Twin Peaks has a giant red AIDS-awareness ribbon on it right now. It's hard to see with my lo-rez cell phone photo, but it's there:
Finding my way back downhill, I called the car shop and they had just finished the work. It was time to drive back to South San Francisco (the Industrial City) and resume packing for the move. I'm very much looking forward to exploring to Philadelphia, and yet will also miss San Francisco.