Saturday I wrote about the ballet. Yesterday I had my "to do list" meltdown. Last night I went to Connie's to work on the pageant sashes and so that Harold could see if our friend Jeremy might want to buy a laptop he had refurbished. These three things are seemingly completely unrelated.
However, Jeremy is one of a group of insanely creative out of the box folks doing really cool things who I met back in 2010 at an event Connie organized called the "Outlaw Preachers (re)Union." (OP10) Among those really cool people are creatives, preachers, folks that run and work with non-profits and others who are part of this crazy thing happening around us that the late Phyllis Tickle called "The Great Emergence."
That I became a part of the Outlaws at all was a bit of Serendipity to begin with. I was 10 months out from being invited to leave the church where I had been serving for the last 10 years when I ran into Connie one day at Sam's. Connie's family of five is obviously larger than my family of three but the amount of stuff she was buying that day was enough for a small army. It was the day before OP10 and she was buying the things she would need for the communal meals and to stock the snack room. We talked a bit and she invited me to come. I'd been hearing about this OP10 thing from a few folks I read online [Adele Sakler (who I'd been following for a year over at the now defunct queermergent) for one] but despite having read THIS
I had no idea that it was Connie's baby. I was excited and I decided that since I didn't have anything else to do that I'd take her up on it and join the (re)Union. She called it that because even though these folks had relationships online, built through a twitter hashtag, for many if not most of us it was the first time we'd ever come together in one physical place. It was a family reunion for a family that had not yet met. So I went. And I met Adele and Jeremy and Jay and John Harrison and Bec Cranford and Bud Wilson and Tim Kurek and a whole bunch more other people that I now count among my friends.
The following year at OP11 I shared a suite with this awesome crew from North Carolina including Hugh Hollowell and his wife Renee. Hugh runs this amazing hospitality house called Love Wins and a year ago he started a weekly letter he calls The Hughsletter where he shares 5 things he has found during the week in his relentless pursuit of beauty. Today one of them was about Ballet, Misty Copeland and Degas which ties back to my posting from Saturday.
One. Two. Three. Connie. Jeremy. Hugh. Serendipity.
Also the embroidery on the sashes got done, I did enough batch cooking to have the basis for three meals at least and I am on track for making my deadlines.
Until tomorrow, my birthday, Peace.
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