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Tuesday, 15 February 2011

  • It was a beautiful day in the neighborhood….

     

    Yesterday we had temps In the upper 60’s with sunshine and a light breeze off the water. It was gorgeous and I spent the afternoon outside painting siding panels and enjoying the glimpse into spring. It’s coming! Sunday on the way home from church I saw faint red mist of tree buds scattered in the woods. We’re on the way for sure from here on out.

     

    In the spring theme of hope and joy and with the inspiration of a good friend, I sat down a thought through what I’ve learned/ how I’ve grown in the past year and a half since college. Here’s what I came up with:

     

    I’ve learned a lot about my own ability to lead.

     

    Working as a crew chief at Springhill (summer ‘09) taught me a lot about managing and the balance between doing and supervising. I learned how to delegate jobs to the people in my crew and drift back and forth checking on them and helping where needed without overpowering them or sitting around watching while they did everything. After coming out of high school and college where everything was catered to me, I was suddenly treated as an adult and learned to push my needs aside and take care of other people. I saw how much more I was capable of even when I thought I had no more to give or couldn’t run on the amount of sleep I was getting. I also learned to drive a tractor (one of my favorite new skills) and use power tools like leaf blowers and string trimmers.

     

    Since I’ve been at Barrier Island I’ve grown a lot in communication and time management. The first year I learned a ton of barrier island and marine biology/ecology, which taught me how much I could still learn outside of college. I remember in training when we were taken out to beach comb and taught about all the washed up things on shore thinking that I would never be able to remember all those things and only a few months later I was leading groups down the beach and easily teaching them about whatever they could find. I’ve gained patience by leading team building activities and seeing kids succeed at things they thought were impossible. I’ve gotten a lot better at teaching by asking leading questions to help people figure something out instead of just spitting out facts. I’ve learned the importance of discipline and that it can be done without being overly harsh.

     

    Getting ready to leave college I thought I would never see any of those people again and I wondered if there was any point to making friendships in temporary places like that if they aren’t going to last. I learned that not all relationships are based on being in the same place and solid friendships can last even when you aren’t right down the hall from each other anymore. I’ve also learned that even if a relationship doesn’t last forever it doesn’t mean that it was meaningless and it doesn’t make it any less real. Coming to South Carolina drove a lot of that stuff deeper. I was really scared coming to a new place away from everything I knew into a job I knew was temporary. I was afraid to become friends with anybody because I felt like we would just all leave at the end of the year, never see each other again and it would all be pointless. But I learned that wasn’t true. We aren’t destined to lose touch forever with people we care about. There are ways to stay in touch. And even if you never see each other again it still matters and it’s worth making relationships with people.

     

    I’ve also learned a lot about God’s love. A good friend pointed out that even our seemingly stupid and unreasonable caring for people with flaws who may come and go and not always return our love is a beautiful fraction of a picture of how God loves us. Instead of looking at that kind of thing as stupid and a reason to be angry at ourselves we can see it as an illustration of God and it can make us love him more instead of hating ourselves. I also finally started to grasp grace and understand how God doesn’t measure me against standards of accomplishments but looks at who I am. He doesn’t get mad when I’m having trouble trusting him and struggling with learning and growing, he sees the desire to grow and what I will become as if it already were.

     

    It’s been a good season. It’s always encouraging to look back and see progress. We’re always growing!

Sunday, 06 February 2011

  • "Well, I'm on my way, but I don't know where I'm going"- Paul Simon

    Looking ahead at the end of this job, housing, etc. in May and seeing options for the future but nothing set yet

    The future is looking hopeful...met my first viable housing option today! And two job possibilities in the wings...now just the waiting time till I can make action on those fronts.

    What I'm learning right now...patience, patience, patience, peace, trust, patience, patience, patience, patience :)

  • "Well, I'm on my way, but I don't know where I'm going"- Paul Simon

    Looking ahead at the end of this job, housing, etc. in May and seeing options for the future but nothing set yet

    The future is looking hopeful...met my first viable housing option today! And two job possibilities in the wings...now just the waiting time till I can make action on those fronts.

    What I'm learning right now...patience, patience, patience, peace, trust, patience, patience, patience, patience :)

Monday, 15 November 2010

  • Story

    I want to share some snippets from this book I'm reading (A Million Miles in a Thousand Years- Donal Miller). It's super inspiring to me right now :)

    It's creative non-fiction following the author as he sets out to edit a memoir of his into a screenplay and ends up transforming not only the story but his life into a better story.

    "...stories are only partly told by writers. They are also told by the characters themselves. Any writer will tell you characters do what they want.

         If I wanted my character to advance the plot by confronting another character, the character wouldn't necessarily obey me. I'd put my fingers on the keyboard, but my character, who was supposed to go to Kansas, would end up in Mexico, sitting on a beach drinking a Margarita. I'd delete whatever dumb thing the character did and start over, only to have him grab the pen again and start talking nonsense to some girl in a bikini. He's do this, remember, in a story about a performance artist-turned-ecoterrorist.

       And as I worked on the novel, as my character did what he wanted and ruined my story, it reminded me of life in certain ways. I mean as I sat there in my office feeling like God making my worlds, and as my characters fought to have their way, their senseless selfish way of nonstory, I could identify with them. I fought with my ecoterrorist who wanted the boring life of self-indulgence, and yet I was also that character, fighting God and I could see God sitting at his computer, staring blankly at his screen as I asked him to write in some money and some sex and some comfort.

       I feel written. My skin feels written, and my desires feel written. My sexuality was a word spoken by God, that I would be male, and I would have brown hair and eyes and come from a womb. It feels literary, doesn't it, as if we are characters in books.

      You can call it God or a conscience, or you can dismiss it as that intuitive knowing we all have as human beings, as living storytellers; but there is a knowing I feel that guides me toward better stories, toward being a better character.   I believe there is a writer outside ourselves, plotting a better story for us, interacting with us, even, and whispering a better story into our consciousness.

    ...So as I was writing my novel, and as my characters did what he wanted, I became more and more aware that somebody was writing me. So I started listening to the Voice, or rather, I started calling it the Voice and admitting there was a Writer."

Monday, 18 October 2010

  • Recent craft/art discovery: homemade envelopes. They're so easy and so much fun to make!

     

    And next....a photo tour of the beach walk from Saturday morning

    A Sweet moth we saw right away. I've never seen anything like it. I think it looks like a stained glass window.

    A blue crab creeping along the shore looking for his breakfast

    Looking out on the salt marsh. It's really starting to fade to it's winter gold quickly now.

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lockbox12

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