Last time I posted, I was in the final couple of months of an AmeriCorps year of service and living near South Bend, Indiana. When my service ended I made a leap of faith and moved to Madison, WI which has long felt like my soul’s home. Finding my place here has been a challenge in terms of both work and a place to call home. Maybe just maybe the pieces are starting to come together.

I haven’t blogged because I haven’t been much of  any of the things that I blog about — gardening, birding, nature photography, gardening, exploring new places, homesteading/sustainability activities, or even cooking.

Time for that to change and the change begins with gardening. For the first time since leaving for Afghanistan back in the summer of 2010, I have dirt in which to garden. I’ll be gardening at the Oregon Community Garden.  I received my plot assignment yesterday and today I am off to start planting.

My plot is about 18 X 18 feet and I have a section in a raised bed that gets partial sun. That raised bed space is 3-4 X 5 feet.  It will be my first year gardening in Wisconsin and my first year as a member of a CSA so there will be a great deal of exploration and experimentation.

The plan for this first round of planting includes: Yukon Gold and fingerling potatoes as well as red, yellow, and white onion sets (all purchased at Jung’s garden center here in Madison), a cha-cha chive plant (Cook’s Garden), mixed beet seeds from Pinetree Seeds and more depending on how things go this afternoon. However these are the things that need to go in the ground asap.

In addition to gardening the next few days will include some exploration and hopefully camera time.

All in all, I feel like I am waking up and emerging after a long dark time of transformation.

These posts are evidence of how different life is here and there. I wasn’t able to explain this pattern to folks back here when I was in Kabul anymore than I can explain it looking back at Kabul from here. I keep hoping that I will eventually be able to pull together a bunch of thoughts I have related to this and what freedom of thinking and security mean. My time first in Kabul and now as an AmeriCorps member has caused me to view security and freedom of thought in an entirely new way.

I am not sure exactly when or how my desire to work for the greater good started. I grew up in a small town in the 70s and 80s and the role models for what girl from a poor family could be were pretty limited — even if she was a really good student. I do remember that one of my middle school dream jobs was to be a photojournalist so that I could tell the story of those who needed help. In high school I dreamed of getting a public relations degree so that I could work for nonprofits and educational campaigns. Sadly following those dreams were beyond the resources I had available to me at the time.

I finished high school living in my own apartment. I managed to find the means to enroll in a junior college. I remember very clearly my thoughts when I was asked to declare a major. I mentally ticked off the three things that I thought were options: nursing, teaching, and accounting. Nursing was not an option. Though my family has several health care workers, I do not have the interest, personality, or set of strengths for that work. At that point, teaching was not an option as I was terrified of speaking to groups. That left accounting though I am not sure why it was on the list of possibilities.

After a year, I transferred to a regional university and continued my journey toward a CPA license. I quickly realized this was not the path for me. I looked at my transcripts, the university catalog, and what I saw as possibilities in small towns in western Oklahoma and tried to find the most efficient path forward. Efficiency was important because I was never sure how long I would be able to afford to attend college. I settled on an office management major with a criminal justice minor thinking that I could find work as a legal assistant.  During this time I was also active in the Jaycees and worked either a full-time job or a combination of part-time jobs including one at a battered women’s shelter. Through Jaycees I was battling my fear of public speaking by entering speech competitions and failing miserably. I was dreaming small and focusing mostly on making ends meet each month.

The day I walked into David Wright’s Introductory Sociology class everything changed. The curtain fell away and an amazing world opened to me. A world so much bigger than my experience had ever suggested. I eventually overcame a fear of statistics to change my major to a double degree program in sociology and office management. With Mr. Wright as my advisor and mentor, I learned to dream bigger, to believe in myself more, and to embrace my desire to work for the greater good. One aspect of this journey was participating in a group that he co-led which worked with men serving life prison sentences.  Actually having the means to finish my degrees began to look like a possibility and then a probability. As the first person in my family to go to college, graduate school was not part of my plans . . . yet.

With a great deal of encouragement from my professors at SWOSU, I decided to try and earn a master’s degree. The goal was to find work helping to reform the very broken prison system from the inside.  I kept poking at my public speaking fear until one day I won that battle. I started to dream of living in Oklahoma City and working for the Department of Corrections. Having traveled outside the state of Oklahoma no further than one trip to Dallas, it didn’t yet occur to me that I might go further in life than Oklahoma City.

More gentle prodding from those who saw more in me than I saw in myself and I found myself accepted into graduate school in Louisiana. In graduate school my world kept expanding. I discovered a talent for teaching. I saw the possibility of working for the greater good by giving to others what Mr. Wright and my other professors had given to me – a new view of the world and a new belief in myself.  With this plan I headed off on a path to earn not only a master’s degree but also a doctorate. I am lucky in that I am good at learning, at quantitative research, and thinking theoretically. That led to mentors and others having big plans for me. I embraced those plans even though they pulled me from my true passion of working for the greater good. The goal became the academic holy grail of a tenure track position and then tenure at a research university.

Fast forward 16 years of  trying to fit my heart’s calling into the nooks and crannies of an all encompassing career in higher education as a faculty member and then administrator. I did far more than my share of university service. I tried to work one national disaster relief operation each summer. I served my local Red Cross chapter. I served as faculty advisor to student groups. I tried to convince myself that I was doing enough but it didn’t feel like I was telling myself the truth. The comfortable life that was unfolding felt like a long path to selling myself and my dreams short.

One afternoon in Mid-May, I saw a position announcement for an administrative job at a university in Afghanistan. I joked to friends about applying. I didn’t mean it . . . at least not at first. Then the idea took root and I applied never dreaming they would take me seriously. The beginning of August found me in Kabul which is a very long way from small town Oklahoma.

I spent a year in Afghanistan. During that time, the inner voice that calls me to service grew too loud to ignore. That voice was inspired by the sight of little boys not more than four drinking out of puddles on the street — puddles that were contaminated with animal and human waste, pollution, and all manner of germs and parasites. It grew louder, each time I looked into the faces of the young women in the courses I taught.  I watched the light in their faces grow as they learned and spent time with those who believed they could do great things with their lives. I worry for what the future will hold for them when the international forces leave the region. I saw the strength, the resolve, the courage, and the goodness in a people that many seek to demonize.

The bubble in which I lived and worked in Kabul became too constricting. Though the intentions were good, I worried that we (the collective international we) were doing more harm than good. Higher education continued to feel too constraining.  I could no longer deny my greatest motivation and desire — my soul’s calling to be of service. Not service from a distance, safely conducted from a university campus but a life spent directly dedicating myself to empowering people, to building community, to working for a safer, saner, more just, and more resilient world for the many not the few.  The big question was how to go about making this transition. Applying for jobs from Kabul was not feasible. While back in the US for a vacation, the universe offered me a way to start the transition in the form of an AmeriCorps year of service.

Spring 2012 finds me nearing the completion of my year of service and exploring the next steps on my path. My goal is a position that allows me to use my skills and talents (i.e., strategic, problem solving and analytical thinking; helping those with differing views find common ground and weaving web of cooperation; synthesizing large amounts of information quickly; being really good under pressure and creating calmness in the midst of chaos and crisis; communicating in many forms; turning numbers into actionable information; asking the question that moves the conversation forward and/or gets to the root of the matter; and learning new things quickly and being able to teach others what I have learned) to work for the greater good while still taking care of myself and keeping Sallie Mae happy by making my student loan payments.

I am a product of Head Start, public schools and universities, social security survivor benefits, the student loan program, the AmeriCorps programs, the caring village of my childhood, and a web of friends and allies in my adulthood. My definition of success may not look like those of the majority. My path may be unusual and it may grow more unusual as my journey continues to unfold. Still  I think the tax dollars invested in me have been a pretty good deal for the American public. It is time to start working even harder to be sure that programs that giving others similar opportunities continue to exist and to help those without such access find ways to live their dreams.

It has been a long trip from a small town girl in Oklahoma who wanted safety and security more than anything to a woman who is willing to consider long- and short-term adventures in service pretty much anywhere in the world including those places with State Department warnings. So my answer to Mary Oliver’s question, “what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” is that I plan to serve; to empower others at every opportunity; to never stop learning; to believe in a safer, more just, and more resilient world, and to never stop doing what I can to help create that world.

Are you a spiritual nomad? Have you collected a diverse set of spiritual practices that help you connect with the Divine? Does you set of beliefs and personal spiritual practices continue to evolve? Would you like to be inspired by and learn from kindred spirits.

If the answer to these questions is YES!, you should check out Dianne Sylvan’s Spiritual Nomad course. Things don’t officially kick off until next week but fun and good conversation happening in the facebook group for those in the course.

2012 shall be a year of discernment. A year of considering the cost versus value added for all aspects fo my life and myself. It shall be a year of letting go of those aspects that do not serve me and help me serve others. It shall be a year of discerning and living my truth and my passion.

2012 shall be a year of deepening my confidence in myself, my service to the world, and my connections to the people I value. It shall be a year of seeking deeper understanding from my experiences in Kabul and my life in general. It shall be a year of looking deeper into my motivations and my fears and a year of deepening my spiritual practice. It shall be a year of dreaming deeper and manifesting those dreams.

Labels can unite.

Labels  can divide.

Labels can  link us to social networks and to tribes where we find support and comfort.

Labels can serve as walls that alienate us from others.  

Labels can give us shortcuts for letting others begin to know us and for knowing ourselves.

Labels can prevent us from coming to know others and ourselves more fully.

Labels can empower.

Labels can harm and even destroy.

Label can open doors and lock them.

Labels help us chart our passage through life in a society that has fewer and fewer rites of passage. Labels can keep us from moving on.

Labels are a blessing and a curse.

No one should be defined by a single label. We are all more than any one of our parts. We are even more than the sum of our parts.  Labels can help us tell our own stories but they should be the start of a conversation not the end of accusation.

Now if you will excuse me I am off to see conversations about and tribal connections with those who share or are curious about some of the labels that currently play a part in my story —  edgewalker, ethicurean, scanner/renaissance soul, world citizen, pronoiac, geek, teacher,  INFJ, and disaster preparedness/response volunteer. I’ll also be working on the courage to add writer, coach, and advocate to my story and making peace with academic being a part of my past.

Erin defines non-goals as “action items that I’ve already put into practice, or things about myself that I want to stay the same this year.” She points out that these non-goals balance the change many of us seek in the new year with stability. They also serve as self praise. I think most of us could use a bit more of that.  The authors of the posts that I read wrote the non-goals  the third person. I think that part of their power comes from letting yourself “hear” the rather than simply “saying” them.

Non-goals and a look back suddenly felt like the right way to begin the journey here. First a bit of context may be helpful. In July of 2010 I accepted a university administration position in Afghanistan. Given that my only experience in travel out of the US had been an academic conference at a high end golf resort in Australia, my time in Kabul was eye opening to say the least. When I came back to the US in the summer of 2011, I made the decision not to return to Kabul for a complicated combination of reasons and found myself in uncharted waters and no plan for the journey forward. One thing led to another and I am now doing a year of service through AmeriCorps to gain some experience outside of academia in general and in the non-profit sector specifically. Given that the last time my life did not revolve around a school or university I was four years old, it has been quite a change but I am enjoying the discoveries and new challenges.

My 2012 non-goals are:

• You followed your inner wisdom even when others thought you were crazy.  It took you where you needed to be! Be sure to keep listening to your wise self but don’t forget to let your inner-child out to play from time to time (she is pretty wise in her own way).
• You opened your mind and your heart to the adventure that is life and to living in the present and you started learning to be yourself.
• In less than four weeks, you gave more than 300 hours of your time to help the victims of Hurricane Irene flooding in New York.  Folks noticed how good you are at handling chaos and taking care of what needs to be done. The praise you received on the job were well deserved. Disaster response work matters to you and you are awesome at it so keep up the good work and take advantage of opportunities to increase your credentials in that area.
• You made nineteen Kiva loans to empower women around the world and here in Indiana you are helping students develop job skills which will increase their opportunities.
• Of the 28 students in the first graduating class at the university where I taught in Kabul, six were in one of my two classes.
• The courage to take the position in Kabul and putting up with the less than clean showers was worth it. You paid off all your consumer debt!! Celebrate the freedom that comes from getting rid of it!
• Good job on the purging and letting go of stuff. It feels so good to create space in life for new treasures so keep it up.
• You are finally starting to believe in yourself and to see what others see in you. You have valuable things to offer the world. Keep up the good work in finding your passion and your voice and offering it to the world.
• You are becoming more comfortable with letting others closer to you. Having the courage to care and to let others know you care feels great.
• You discovered that life that has room for more than work is pretty amazing and that sometimes creating the life you want requires coloring outside the lines.  Don’t forget those lessons.

As for the look ahead, I will be focusing on discovery, discernment, and deepening  as I weave  my passions for knowledge (learning & teaching), the natural world, empowering people & communities, and everyday miracles & beauty into a curious life.

If I were talking to you one on one, I would try to offer the greeting specific to what is important to you though I might pronounce it all wrong. When addressing a group or when I don’t know what holidays matter to you, I opt to be as inclusive as possible in my best wishes. I do this because I believe that the world needs all the joy, peace, hope, healing, and tolerance that we can spread.

So please know that for me “Happy Holidays” includes a wish for any and all of the following plus heart-felt wishes for any other holidays you celebrate in the coming weeks: Peace and Condolences to those observing Ashura; chag Chanukah sameach to those observing Hanukkah (for the record that is not a Jewish Christmas and is not a major holiday in the Jewish calendar); Solstice Blessings; Merry Christmas (whether you celebrate that on Dec. 25 or on Jan. 7 as observed my many Orthodox Christians); Habari gani to those observing Kwanzaa; Happy New Year if that happens for you on Jan 1 (including those observing the Japanese New Year) or the 23rd if you are observing the Chinese Lunar New Year). This list grows longer as my experiences and network become more diverse. (note: order of holidays is based on occurrence not any perceived importance)

So whatever you are observing: Happy Holidays and if you happen to have a birthday in the near future Happy Birthday too! I hope your special days help you reconnect to family and friends, to meaningful traditions, to your most heart-felt beliefs and that they provide blessed memories for you to carry forward.

• eager to learn or know; inquisitive

• arousing or exciting speculation, interest, or attention through being inexplicable or highly unusual; odd; strange: a curious sort of person; a curious scene.