Dear Friends and friends:

Like Friend Dorothy Parshall, I am a life long Friend, and as some of you know, most of the time, well, years at a time dress plain. My friends and I from childhood still use thee and thy when speaking together, and I was very happy to see some young friends returning to a plain witness and plain speach.

Eric, ol'Barnical, our use of thee and thy has nothing to do with German. We began when a West country Englishman when north to Westmoreland in the lake country and found himself very in tune with the seekers there. We use thee and thy because you is plural, which, I believe is why we do not use thou. Thou takes a unique for of the verb to be, "art" which sounds a lot like are, the plural of to be... thou "art" sounds like you "are" where thee uses "is" the common singular. It is an expression of thruth. We are not made plural by our situation... a judge is not a you ... a plural because he is a himself and his office. Once you was only used for your "betters". Thee said you to thy father, as he was both himself and his family, he said "you" to the landlord, as he was himself and his land. Now everyone is a you, which is not really the case, as unless you are schizophrenic thee is a singluar.

I am presently on a witness of absence from my meeting and my quarter, as I have found that property interests revolving around our... no, the "Quaker" schools has perverted the process at the center of our communities search for God collectively. These schools of eletism and wealth and power are no more Quaker than, well... Richard Nixon.

Maybe this is the new Quakerism, in which case, I like Fox find myself wandering, slightly lost, dressing plain, but on the road to a new Westmoreland (where my family came from, by the way...)
Some others and I seem drawn to a new expression of our old faith, in a Quakerism returning to our days on the fronteer, a meeting which cannot hold property together, as property leads to corruption of the spirit. Some meetings still hold property well together, but once a school is injected into the mix, too many others make politic out of process and the spirit dies.
Last year I would have said, in my opinion the spirit may die. But seeing that the man who commits war crimes on our behalf has sent his children to a "Quaker" school, and now, the 15 st. Meeting in NYC is in the process of accepting a gift of 28 million dollars from that same branch of government... I am lost. We once refused all products of war, "prise goods". Now our meetings are led by non-Quakers who pull the meeting by the nose into war profiteering... and we are damned.

Thine, dearly in the light
Friend Lorcan Otway

PS I have three, at least, of my Quakers songs posted here, one is about Mary Dyer, one about Richard Murray and the underground railroad and one about the peace feather. The last two are from storries told to me by my dear Friend Anna Curtis, who died many decades ago, and was my First Day School teacher.