Contrary to my naive assumptions, life did not slow down once Mary left. In fact, the friendships we’d formed while she was here brought my transition from AmeriCorps volunteer to commonplace resident into full swing. As the winding down of AmeriCorps freed up my schedule, my hours at the coffee shop began to fill with any additional time being very willingly confiscated by my new family.
I’m not any sort of major Pomp and Circumstance type but I tend to need some sort of ceremonial or reflective period to process large transitions. In the past, I think this has been both because of the piecemeal way I’d been viewing my life and my level of ability to deal with change in general. Sometimes it meant traveling overseas, sometimes it meant isolating myself for months, sometimes it was a season on a farm, then a couple years in AmeriCorps. But with all of these “chapters”, I felt like I was always starting new books.
Back in the spring, I had begun frantically looking for jobs, trying to shove some sort of intuitive wisdom into a box confined by a timeframe. I’ve separated pieces of my life this way very often, and up until this year, it has usually worked out. However, as I tried to get together a plan that would have me up and out of Packwood by mid-July, there was no miraculous unfolding, no stroke of genius or inexplicable feeling of certainty. There was just stress, panic and a deep sense of failure. Amidst this mental and emotional debacle, I was also devoting plenty of time feeding the frustrating stalemate that I was in with my digestion. At one point, I began to consider simply moving back home, living with my parents, and putting life on pause for a year or two of a sort of out-patient care.
But nothing felt quite right.
Well, it is now July 17th and I am still in Packwood. One week ago, we had our AmeriCorps end-of-year “celebration”, traditionally the time to give gifts, get certificates and take cheesy group photos. Leo and I were headed out of town that day for a show and I stopped by on the way through Randle to get my certificate and pay my regards to Meghann. In a week, i haven’t looked back once to place that symbolic marker or ending. I haven’t needed to.
This year most certainly had its challenges and many times, I let myself get hung up on the rifts among team dynamics. Yet in the end, the year underwent a metamorphic change.
To us, a caterpillar is a caterpillar until it is a butterfly. The change is abrupt and almost perceived as different realities all together. But to the caterpillar, his process is one of going in, gradually moulding and adapting in one continuous flow.
I feel like I am finally beginning to move like the caterpillar.
Once I was able to access what AmeriCorps meant to me, I focused my attention in those areas for the rest of the year. The community and the personal relationships with the kids became a daily second-nature. It would never have felt right to rush out of my working position and straight out of town. It has been a gift to be received as not just an AmeriCorps volunteer, but as a valuable member of this community. Because the people of Packwood have embraced me that way, there has been no need for ceremonious closure with the AmeriCorps team.
The friendships that I have cultivated during this shift couldn’t have happened at any other time. Just as the community supported me in a way that did not force me to isolate beginnings and endings, I have a deep inner feeling as I move forward, that I am supported in a way that doesn’t make life feel like a series of misplaced puzzle pieces. As I look to the future these days, it is beginning to feel like a continuation, not an isolated experiment. That desperate feeling to pause life and tackle one aspect of my challenges at a time is not the crippling voice that it was months ago.
It is a strange and surreal world right now, in the best of ways. During AmeriCorps service, one can get so wrapped up in the paperwork documentation as a means of showing “progress”, that it begins to feel stale and insincere. However, as I am writing this, I am finally able to recognize some of the transformations that were going on in myself and see the experience as a whole. I am captivated with my present moments and the person who I am becoming. I am captivated by the discovery of people in my life who fully honor, support and enhance that. I am experiencing belonging once again, with all of it’s love, joy, challenges and mystery that is not easily put into words…
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