Reflection On An Aging Nomad

I finally finished retiring four years ago, a process that started in my mid-fifties due to late adopting kids with special needs, including needs for me to be home to personally walk them on, harness them in, and wheel them back off, their diverse buses and robotic ramped vans. During those final weeks of quasi-gainful employment I amped up my search for a new home preferably in New London, CT, because I had visited, and liked, All Souls UU; But, possibly in Norwich, where I have some family, not necessarily white like me, or someplace more rural in-between. Long story short, which is not like tangential me, I ended up or started out, depending on where this story starts for you and me on the south end of Norwich, just north of the old State Hospital, seeking healthy justice above a steep and brooding bank down to the troubled Thames River. From here it is difficult not to notice how traffic flows between Norwich and New London. But, in the case of All Souls UU and UU Norwich, not so much, maybe not enough. When I lived in the Hartford area I joyfully attended the Unitarian Society of Hartford, a fairly large multicultural tent filled with reviving gospel music. So, when looking for a retirement destination, I traveled on-line to uua.org to see what might be available in addition to All Souls New London and found a small cell, apparently renters quasi-homeless, Norwich UU, or UU Norwich, or maybe both I hope. I pictured no choir, no active faith formation options for people of all ages and figured, probably not right for me. Long story maybe a little bit short, it took me over four years to make my first Norwich UU visit, recently. I found somewhat fewer of us than the number of Norwich residents on the All Souls Members and ActiveAllies list. My background is in cooperative economic and affordable housing development. With an MDiv from a Catholic seminary and a double-Master's in Public Administration and Community Development from Southern Illinois, Carbondale, where Bucky Fuller once taught Synergetics, It feels awkward to invest in All Souls together where all souls are welcome, by commuting back and forth alone in my blue steel truck, while there is clearly plenty of room and welcome available right in my new home town, where I now know no one except family, over four years later. This is a schizophrenic discomfort for climate activist and cooperative local community investor me. Back in my early adoption years, I worked in the Office of Urban Affairs, New Haven, for the Archdiocese of Hartford, where I listened to a great deal of turmoil about aging and poor urban parishes thinking about how to join forces to survive while sharing a clergy ministry team. So, I wonder How would it feel to UU Norwich survivors, activists, communicants, healthy and smart registrants to vote local while thinking global, to carpool to All Souls on Sunday mornings, to sit together in chairs hooked to-gather, perhaps joined by us other emigrant immigrant Norwich residents already All Souls affiliated, To also share a discussion circle after the chalice light is extinguished to check in with each other over coffee, maybe herbal tea, to reflect on what we heard and sang and sometimes endured, today, To ponder aloud how this speaks and does not speak why and how and when we arrive together back in Norwich, having solved and resolved to absolve most of the Thames River watershed issues rolling back and forth and swelling in-between this tidal river's ups and downs. Perhaps some of us or even all of us would also like to form a Sanctuary Circle meeting during the week. Maybe have lunch together, share our Norwich organizing and multicultural explorations together, contribute to All Souls Green Sanctuary and GRACE anti-racism projects, restore justice to replace retributive injustice, speak power with truth, live together, not apart, more resiliently. Perhaps it is possible to grow more robust as a distinguished part of All Souls, combine resources, economize cooperatively, ecologize more holistically and theologize more healthily without losing Norwich UU tradition, focus mission, effective resonance, green and black and brown and rainbow resilience. As for me, I'm still looking at New London real estate listings while troubled about abandoning a nomad's home in which I never let myself fully invest While dreaming of emigrating further south downriver toward climatically rising water levels unstill in my first five carbon-burning years of retiring immigration.