I went to Quaker Meeting at the Easton Friends Meeting in Easton, N.Y., this morning. From the moment (photo above) I sat down on one of their beautiful old benches – the meeting house was built in 1838 – I knew I was home.

It was my first meeting in years. It was a wonderful idea.

I felt an outpouring of peace and safety in my heart and all over my body.

I want to get involved.

Next Friday, I’m going to help the members of the meeting – there are not many and most are older – clean up their beautiful summer Meeting House down the road so it can open for the summer on July 12.

I became a Quaker when I was 14. I joined the Quaker Meeting in Providence, R.I.,  and left Judaism, my birth faith, behind.

I am a Quaker if anyone asks.

In this faith, you can believe whatever you want, nobody tells you what to think. There is no dogma to follow other than peace and love.

When I lived in Montclair, N.J., I joined the Montclair Friends meeting and was active in that meeting for some years until I burned out from doing too many things, as I  tend to do.

As someone once described me, I am a person of many passions, and some of them run away with me.

I love Quakerism; it was everything organized religion was not for me – quiet, gentle, peace-loving, and supportive. I knew I had come home when I went to my first Quaker meeting.

When I moved to the country, I stopped going to meeting for a long time. There was no meeting in my town, and moving to a farm disrupted, disengaged, and interrupted my spiritual and secular life.

I’ve been working for years to get back on track and recently have very much missed going to meetings. I missed the people, the silence, and the passion for helping the needy and the vulnerable.

I missed the thoughtfulness and the empathy that is such a deep part of the faith. There are no powerful leaders to dictate belief.

I have never felt as comfortable anywhere in my life as at a Quaker meeting.

You don’t ever have to argue about freedom, climate change, equal rights, helping the poor, religious freedom,  a woman’s right to control her body, ending wars, or gun violence.

For the life of me, I don’t know why Quakerism hasn’t attracted millions of people in modern-day America, but I know many meetings are struggling – they are too quiet, too soft, and too sensitive for our times.

In a sense, that also makes them intimate. I like that.

Quakerism is my faith for life; it helps me become the person I want to be, even if I am not yet there. Spiritually, this is a huge step forward for me. I’m ready to take it.

I want to go slowly and carefully. I don’t want to burn out.

I want to go home, and I took a big step today. This is where I can go to feel grounded, accepted, and experience solitude, genuine love.

I’m not a freak or outlier; I am among my kind.

This is where I go to continue my spiritual work.

Maria came with me today, she is not a Quaker but loved the meeting. She said she never felt safer anywhere.

At the meeting, a woman came by from outside who heard I was there and who had read my books.

She asked the panel if she could bring her dog Princess to meet me. She was, I think, developmentally disabled.

The entire meeting welcomed her, invited her in, and thanked her for coming. I have a troubling (to many) people penchant for speaking my mind too directly and for breaking the rules and causing trouble.

I have never gotten in trouble in a Quaker Meeting or broken a rule I know of. I love the Quakers; there are very few rules, but if somebody breaks one, they change it.