i will, in the end, make a log. one person came at seven a m, and five came at seven p m. both were good meetings. the first was much like you would expect of a meeting of two - it had more talking, less silence. the second, with six of us altogether, had more silence, and more structure too. it was like the older friends demanded it, came for it, wanted it. ok so as i gravitate more toward a genuine quaker meeting, i actually like that; i didn't resist.

it's a quaker meeting on zoom. i'm not going to have all the quakers i've ever known in my life, but i'll at least meet a few, and carry on with this quaker meeting, and explore zoom all at the same time. zoom is a marvelous platform. even my millenial sons like it and admire it. one millenial took all this time to show me the various things one can do on it, so as to have something to focus a meeting's attention on, at the same time we are experiencing silence.

in the ordinary quaker meeting, it turns out, people focus on one item in the room. in the meeting i started out in, it was a woodstove. there were ordinary, hard, wooden pews, and old fashioned windows, but i'd fix my eyes on the woodstove and then go into silence; it was wonderful. there were also the trucks - the interstate, as it came through iowa, had to make a single turn in order to avoid the tiny quaker cemetery, in which relatives of nixon and relatives of hemingway were buried. that turn, in hilly eastern iowa, was really the only turn in the state, but it forced truckers to change gears, and we could hear that in the silence.

my point? zoom forces you to put your attention on something. it would be my job to figure out what. it's not rocket science. maybe i'll take a picture of my woodstove and run it through the photo editor.

morning: donne and me. evening: maurine, miriam, morgan, karl, mckennon, and me. i might be wrong about that last name; i kept getting his name wrong, and may still have it wrong, for all i know.

the meeting has two things dear to me: the name "cloud," and, mountain time. it's very much rooted in my existence here, in the clouds, in the mountains. it's my own meeting, though i easily, readily grant the group the power to control its direction.