Thunderstorms

The rain is relentless. It will continue for the weekend while Kami recovers from his ballsy procedure and we watch movies I checked out of the library. We are pretty fast watching all of the Johnny Depp movies ever made. Someone at work gave him a cookie frosted to look like Captain Jack Sparrow, but it is a mystery who.
I have lots of details to arrange as organizer of a fundraising party in two weeks: kite-making supplies, marimba music, banners made of balloons and leafy branches. Will the health department allow us to sell tamales? Do I need to buy a badminton net at Target to string the decorations onto, in the absence of any other space-delineating structures on the grass? If it rains, then the simul-fiesta for Radio Ixchel's transmitter is not going to feel much like a party. These events call for signage and then more signage, and task-assignation: I need to make pretty boxes for the money to go in, and then clearly mark them with signs.
Yesterday I talked to a repeat caller to the helpline at the women's center. I was so nervous because it didn't go well between us once before. I have to try so hard to give her the kind of support she wants- not advice, just some myserious and elusive "clue" for how to stay in her center- all the pressure threatens to make me draw a blank, and it is no cakewalk. I've noticed that these callers, people who are lacking face-to-face connections in their lives, are very much in their heads. They always ask "WHAT DOES IT MEAN" and seem to want answers to the greater mysteries of life. I want to find some way to convince them that this isn't really what they need to know. That understanding what it means and why usually isn't what allows us to change in deep ways. Accepting that we can't know, but that we can have faith in who we are and where are now anyway, can. Learning "from experience" isn't learning "what it means," but perhaps learning to let go of that search for a singular meaning. "What do my feelings mean?" is sort of like an oxymoron.
Other callers are easy. They just ramble, and I let them. Once I tried to stop the stream of random information, but now I just let her go on. I'm not her therapist, and she's calling just to tell someone what's up- not get to the root of things, so I don't force it. I like how the women's center is an evolving entity, that everyone learns from and creates equally. As co-creators, we have to be careful about imposing our views and rules on anyone, even if we think it's for their own good. This means listening to people talk about how aggravating the cat is, or how confusing their phones are, or how alienated they feel from the screen of numbers they are forced to stare at all day at work without having an interpretation of these people and their problems. Sometimes a screen of numbers is just a screen of numbers, and all she needs to hear is that she will find her way through it. but her thirst for encouragement is bottomless. If anyone knows any good, pat encouraging phrases, I would like to collect them so that I won't have to feel that dreadful hole in my stomach the next time she asks for it.