Life Lessons From A Legal Filing & A Funeral
This was originally published on Facebook on May 13, 2022.
This week's life lessons come from a legal filing and a funeral - and an entertaining funeral at that.
The funeral was for someone who's had more of an impact on my life than I usually think.
The stories told were hilarious, because the couple was unexpectedly so.
You couldn't help but laugh.
Some people are just so full of life and love that you don't even know what to do with it.
And from a couple of people that would have been called "squares" at some point up in this country. From people like me who thought I was too cool for such upstanding, grounded, together individuals.
I was a rough kid.
Didn't look like it from the outside. But people who knew me well in high school knew there was some deep trauma.
It came out as an edge. As a pushback against authority. Against authority figures. Including anyone trying to be nice and just look after humans. Which this couple was.
Nevertheless, I stuck around for their leadership.
I stuck around for the community they created. With a bunch of kids from different small towns all there for the connections. For something we didn't get in our home towns.
I was impressed by the other kids who went through proper processes and ceremonies and respect for elders and all the other hoops we jumped through to be in county 4-H stuff.
We all went through the motions back then because we were getting something out of it overall: community, and connection.
We listened to cheesy stories and were lovely to the adults like this couple because that's what we learned. Because they were nice to us.
You couldn't help but be nice back. And it would have been very very uncool not to be. I'm sure I even tried it, but it was pretty clear if you were going to be a part of the group that the super together,, really grounded, mysteriously happy, cheesy adults came with it. A package deal. And that's part of community - embracing the people who are in it for who they are.
I would say I've never met nicer people than this particular couple, but other adults in that group and also two of my grandparents were the exact same way. Less hilariously cheesy, but just as giving. In fact, the person whose funeral it was is one of the people most like my grandma that I've ever met.
I knew she was an anchor in my life. Pure and consistent. Radiant and happy and steadfast. A life of service. Absolutely a model.
I'm glad I got to spend some time with her as an adult. Even though it was not as much as I intended. At least partly because of the pandemic. But partly because of other things I've been been trying to do.
Since I moved back I did get to spend at least some time with the whole group of people who were adult 4-H leaders when I was in high school.
I got even more respect for them watching how even in retirement they dedicated hours and years to do neat things for kids.
To creating the space for kids to be amazing. To thrive. To get mentored. To evolve and grow.
~~~
The funeral was at the same church where I sat in the country on purpose (in a vehicle) in a lightning storm a few weeks ago. I've never been inside the building. It's a fancy new church here in the big college town.
The couple is from a small town where I grew up - not far away.
A bunch of the people at the funeral were from that town. People I knew or recognized from growing up.
Some of them also helped support me as a kid with all of the stuff I was doing back then. Like raising money for trips to places I would live in later, or for a community recycling program.
I learned from a lot of the people in that room - including the one who had passed - that you can do big things. Or medium things. Or small things. Or you can just create community and connection... and invest in that. Or you can do both.
What I haven't been doing as much of lately is creating real world community.
I've known that, but it's a different thing to see at least some of the community other people created sitting in a big room honoring the loss of one of their own.
Decades of connection in there. Nothing short of that.
An amazing speaker from the family told the stories. I've never laughed so hard at a funeral. I think probably no one else in there had either.
You couldn't help it. Because people so full of life and love bring that kind of thing to the world. They just do. And everybody in there knew it.
I was already planning to build more community myself like in the very, very near future... but this was a kick in the kelly-green 4-H color pants to do it even better than what I'd been thinking about. In all kinds of ways.
Our society is a freaking mess and we need each other.
We need some anchors to help us get through.
But we also need each other for more than that - we also need to transform the damn thing. Society.
Because what we're doing is so completely not sustainable.
More people are talking about collapse all the time.
What about transformation?
I don't want the society to collapse, for crying out loud.
It would all be so, so, so much worse if collapse were to happen. That would hurt marginalized and oppressed people even more than this jacked-up society we have right now.
I have always been a transform-it-from-the-inside kind of a person.
Now's the big moment for that.
What would society look like collapsed, anyway? That's a question for a different post.
But I can tell you we would have a hell of a lot more than baby formula shortages and inflation.
Collapsed society would look more like eastern Ukraine right now, but with less Russian shelling. It would look like refugees and people needing food and power outages and no cell service.
Humans need infrastructure. We also need government.
So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to help with some of the transformation bits.
And I'm going to help us with community and connection to do some of that.
~~~
Which leads me to my second lesson of the week, which I got from playing within the system.
I filed the proper paperwork at the state level for a new nonprofit group that can help with all of this. Last time I filed this paperwork it got rejected due to process flub-ups.
This time I realized I could ask for help. So I totally did.
That's the lesson: I asked for help.
I emailed the state office and asked for a play-by-play with the tricky bits of the process. And by god they responded and helped.
As of this morning, we are an official and legal organization in this state and also according to the federal government. So take that, Republicans!
Now we just have to create a movement of people willing to make some shift happen in the communities where we live, in government meetings everywhere, and all the way up to Washington.
I don't know all of what we're going to do yet because we're going to invent a lot of it.
But the point is: we're getting started.
I'm probably not going to be as cheesy as these leaders I learned from.
Plus I still have an edge. Big time. Now from way more trauma since high school. But hey - I'm not alone in that.
We've got a whole hell of a lot of traumatized people who are not willing to put up with the society that's being created in front of us.
I'm convinced we can shift it in a different direction. I'm so all in I can't even describe it.
New website and whatnot coming in a few days. We're closer and closer. Stick with us. Serious shift to come.
And keep the faith.
We are totally going to turn this shift around.