This has been my Quaker meetinghouse since childhood. In graduate school I focused my art on medical waiting rooms. I am drawn to them as these strangely dissociated, floating spaces, intentionally innocuous non-spaces for passing non-time. I am curious about how we become acculturated/accustomed to behave in specific ways as soon as we enter these holding tanks, and how that might affect our ways of thinking as well. This, my Quaker worship space, might be considered one of God’s waiting rooms. We wait for our name to be called, to make contact with the spirit or “light within.” I wander here, still awkward and uncomfortable with the very notion of worship and religion. I chafe in the silence of waiting. In the still, long silences of our meeting I taste the burden of the unknown and unknowable. It is disquieting, and inner stirrings clash with outer quietude. I scan the simple but charged room for a visual anchor. The room shifts, or was that I? We sit; still, waiting.
