Twenty~Five

I wrote this post a while ago when I was hit with a wave of anger and resentment towards you. I didn't post it, because I wanted to let go and forgive and move on. Then I went over to your house on Christmas yesterday and we screamed at each other and Patrick had to pull me away before I broke something. I finally told you what I felt in my heart without holding back, even if you were incapable of listening. I stood up to you and was fearless and strong and realized you don't control me anymore.You showed up to mom's house today with letters to each of us, about how we failed you as children, your idea of direct communication. Ice cold. All I have gotten from you is coldness and I've learned to mistake that for love. I refuse to make this mistake any longer, from anyone.  It would be easy to just blame everything on you. To blame you for Patrick going through what he's going through, to blame you for why I feel undeserving of love, to blame you for mom constantly ...

We made it back to Sacramento and it's a surreal experience being back here. It feels like a stranger I've seen before in dreams, familiar but foreign. I had no idea what was ahead of me when I left McLellan Park in early November. Seems as if a lifetime has gone by in a short month and a half. When we got back yesterday and were unpacking our things from the van, Jon, who barely says a word, goes "I feel different. When we left Sacramento, I liked you guys. Now, I love you." Ms. Oian, the unit leader for the green teams, mentioned today during our celebration/project debrief the importance of journaling, so we can remember the little things that are so easy to forget and reflect on what we've learned. I've learned so much I don't know where to begin. There's so much I never want to forget. It's a day later now. I completed this entry earlier today, and it all somehow got deleted. I was upset about this because I worked hard on the entry and re...

JOSHUA TREE. JOSHUA FUCKING TREE CAPTURED MY HEART AND SOUL YESTERDAY. We left Phoenix, Arizona at around 6 and I watched a beautiful sunrise from the van window and felt lucky to be alive. There is such a lot of world to see and I'm out here seeing it. Man oh man. Anyway, we drove all morning and ended up at Joshua tree at around noon. We stopped at the visitor center. I decided to trail off behind it and walk a bit, into the desert, until I had the sense I was alone with my surroundings. It was a level of quiet I have never experienced in a natural environment. I heard absolutely nothing and was in the middle of this tremendously infinite landscape. There is an entire world within Joshua Tree and it is silent, the entire ecosystem is perfectly intertwined and complex yet appears still and unwavering. This stillness was an inexplicably emotional experience for me. I could have stood there forever, and maybe would have until Ian tapped my shoulder and reminded me I shouldn't wa...

12.19 It's already day six of our trip back to Sacramento. I've been meaning to write, but my head hasn't been totally in the game for the past week. I've been groggy and my head hurts and everything feels tired. I'm not sure if it's possible, but Rohan has mono and I'm a little bit afraid I have it again for the third time. Then again, maybe I'm just paranoid and hit my head too hard on the bunk bed the other day. Who's to say. Anyway, I'm getting back to my normal self slowly and it feels good. So far, we've stayed in Mobile AL, Vicksburg MS, Abilene TX, El Paso TX, and Phoenix AZ. I've memorized the breakfast selection of the Holiday Inn chain and have made a hobby out of comparing the biscuit deliciousness at each location. Sleeping on beds again has exceeded all of my wildest dreams, who would've thought something so simple would bring me tremendous peace and comfort. I became so used to sleeping on tiny cots I forgot how nice...

LAST DAY IN COCOA BEACH. My heart is light as I drink my Einstein Brothers vanilla sweet cream cold brew and listen to Harry Styles in the mini van. In my head I'm saying goodbye to the clear blue sky and ocean views. It's been "cold" here for the past few days (as in, low 50s), and for the first time I can feel Winter missing from me. I see pictures of snowy windows and Christmas sweaters and I long for Christmas lights and the cozy chill of New York. Home. I started thinking yesterday about what Home means to me, a strange dichotomy to deal with. There's the home I grew up in, that I built my life around. The yellow house with red doors. Is that still home? At least, one of them? Can a place still be a home if it no longer holds any love for you?  Perhaps not. Maybe it's just a shell of memories floating in the air. Inhabited by a single soul incapable of forgiveness, tormented by emptiness. Then, there's a new home. A fresh home, devoid of fear and ...

It's Sunday night and the weekend is coming to a close quickly as it always does. The weekends here only consist of Sundays, so we do our best to make them count.  Last night, we wandered around town and ended up playing truth or dare, minus the dare. I learned what my friends here would see if they could see anything. I learned what their most defining moments in their lives were thus far, and about the last time they cried. I was reminded that each person is so intricately deep and unique. Every one of these people has darkness in their past, a brilliant darkness that makes the light of their being stand out even more. Below the surface of each human is an unexplored little universe that longs to be discovered and understood. Today, we went to Kennedy Space Center. We saw the site of the first American space launching, got up close to the Atlantis, (a REAL rocket ship!!), and watched some compelling IMAX movies in 3D, among many other fascinating activities. One movie sh...

December in cocoa beach is absolutely flying by. How can we make time slow down? Boy, I wish I knew. Life here is so simple, yet so perfect in its simplicity. I keep meaning to update my blog but it gets forgotten in the motion of daily life. I've been writing in my journal a lot, on long van rides or during my breaks in homeowners' lawns. Mostly, I've been documenting all the little beautiful moments that bring a smile to my face. I'm in constant awe at how many of these moments I find throughout my day. We've been spending our time in full-body Tyvex suits and respirators, sledge-hammering mold out of people's homes. Each day, I excrete my entire body weight in sweat and must attempt to convince my brain not to go into panic mode. It's tough. It's a mental and physical challenge for all of us. But I am reminded not to wish it away. I sometimes get caught up in the monotony of daily life and I forget that I am alive. It's really, really easy to ...

Today I'm all buzzed on life. I feel a little bit like a bad ass beyotch because I spent the day with the boys from the Utah Conservation Corps, hauling trees out of peoples' yards and getting shit DONE for America. Grant and I volunteered to work with Roderick and Mattheus, two members of the Utah corps. Roderick is ultra blonde, has the slightest lisp, and gives off the whole suoper friendly-nature-loving-cigarette-smoking-lives-out-of-his-car- kinda vibe. He doesn't believe in smart phones. Mattheus is extremely quiet and shy, with dark brown hair and a thick mustache. It's 3:30 and he just talked for the first time in the car, telling us how he worked at Six Flags for a season. I even caught him a second ago dancing to Michael Jackson a little bit, and I took that as a sign he's inching out of his shell. That's another thing about today: we spent all our time in the car listening to Michael Jackson's album, Bad, because apparently it's the only music...

yesterday we received the news that we would no longer be moving to a church 5 minutes away from the fairgrounds, but instead moving 3 hours away to Cocoa Beach, Florida. This morning we picked up all our things and hit the road. We arrived at an old schoolhouse that has been transformed into a Red Cross facility. We walked through the front hallway and out into a cute courtyard/garden area, with a red bench swing and colorful animal statues. There are doors surrounding the courtyard on all sides each leading to an old classroom, and one of the doors so happened to lead to our new "bedroom." We opened the red door and found our 13 cots awaiting us, side by side, in a tiny old schoolhouse room. After unpacking our minimal belongings, we put on our bathing suits and headed to the BEACH, which is only a 10 minute drive from our new home (how amazing is that??) By the time we got there it was around 3, and it was the perfect time of day. We ran into the ocean with reckless abando...

I haven't written in a while though I've been meaning to. The past week or so has been painful, physically and emotionally, and it has taken me some time to recover. For a bit there, I wasn't able to find myself, I wasn't able to reach that inner light that's usually so readily accessible. I got another concussion last Saturday, leaving me with terrible incessant migraines and sending me into an over-dramatically hopeless state. Again, I thought? I swore I wouldn't be reckless enough to hurt my head again, especially after the profound effects the last concussion had on my life only months ago. Then I went and hurt it anyway, my self-preservation skills failing me once again. I resent regret, but there it was, standing in the front of my mind replaying the uncontrollable over and over again. The seemingly earth-shattering team drama, self realizations and family matters that went along with the week didn't help my fickle emotional state, that's for ...

It's the early morning and I've been watching the droplets of dew race across the van window. I'm thinking about how fresh and ambiguous everything is in the morning, as new beginnings tend to be. The fog blankets the fields of the fairgrounds we're staying at, dew covers the ground and the windows. Then, before you know it, it is daytime and the fog clears and windows dry. The strange comforting uncertainty of the early morning fades. The team has been getting a bit discouraged, because the government lowkey sent us all the way from California to Florida to loiter in gas station parking lots and do free landscaping for old people. Grant expressed to me last night candidly that he feels like his time here is being wasted. While I understand where he is coming from, I don't share the same perspective. I don't feel my time is being wasted at all. I have learned slowly not to have expectations for just about anything. This makes me much happier.  Grant once told ...

Today my mind keeps going back to school, I don't know why exactly. Some memories are pleasant to revisit, some are painful, some are both. I keep going back to the moments where I consciously said to myself "remember this and hold on to this. This moment is bliss and it will go away. Don't let it get away too quick." Those days at Leddy, laughing over beers and jumping in the frigid burlington water. Warm nights on the 303 stoop that I swore would be my favorite place on earth forever (it might still be). People-watching from the boy's deck on college street. Singing duets with Sean at karaoke. Coming home and finding all my friends in my bed. Jumping on the kitchen chairs with Lizzy screaming Miley Cyrus. Tile floors and cracked ceilings and red wine and cozy movie days. Dancing under the church street lights. Heady topper at the sunset with Patrick. Those days I would walk to the park and meditate at the water, filled with a warmth that assured me I belong here...

On a lighter note: It's DAY 4 of our grand cross country trip, and it's going better than expected. I'm actually really enjoying myself. So far we've been tremendously spoiled with Holiday Inns, continental breakfasts, and eating out every night. Florida is going to hit us hard with a reality check, where we'll be sleeping on cots and living on our 4$ daily food budget again. But we'll finally be helping people, something I'm very excited about. Yesterday was good. I got to watch the sunrise from the driver's seat and the sunset from the backseat. I had a long convo with Jon about our lives and who we wanted to be. I chased people around singing high school musical during one of our stops. Roy saved me from being harassed by a homeless man. I got to play in the pool late at night and sleep on a bed that felt like a cloud. Today, we drove through Texas en route to Monroe, Louisiana. Texas was very flat and pretty much fit my expectations of what it w...

Another day in the van. This morning we woke up in Gallup, New Mexico and started our journey to Childress, Texas. The scenery is absolutely beautiful. I've discovered New Mexico is a land of rocky, dirt covered mountains and stretches of desert fields. There are huge, rust-colored cliffs intermittently that appear so vividly against the vast baby blue sky. The SKY!!! The sky seems to go on forever, a vast expanse of nothingness and everything at the same time. I've been looking at the clouds a lot, and in some snippets of daydreams I start to feel like one. Light and fleeting, slowly floating along. Our endless driving makes me feel like I'm floating from state to state in a hazy dream, uncertain which parts of me are here to stay and which are transient. I've obviously had a lot of time alone with my thoughts over the past two days. Usually, the slow pace of the world around me would give them permission to act up and wreak havoc. But to my surprise, my thoughts hav...

We're setting off on Day 2 of our road trip adventure. We woke up in Needles, CA this morning around 6, had delicious continental breakfast at a place called the Giggling Cactus, and were on our way. Right now we are in Arizona, surrounded by an arid yet mountainous desert. Though it's not the most comfortable situation possible, I love being in the van. I love watching all the different landscapes pass me by. I love how I can feel myself getting even closer to my team. I love how we performed an acapella version of Someone Like You last night while I was driving and all our phones had died. I love being absolutely nowhere in particular.  Today, we're stopping at the Grand Canyon. I get to see the Grand Canyon! How amazing is that. I feel as though all these tiny little coincidences keep lining up in a beautiful way, and I don't know if I've ever felt freer. Thank you universe, for continuously blessing me with more beauty than I ever imagined was possible in every...

Today was a lovely, relaxed day. We were supposed to have an ISP this morning at a local garden, but it RAINED here, which never ever happens so it was cancelled. We all met in the laundry room at 7:45 with all our rain gear, got in the van and started to pull away when Roy got the call that it was off. So we changed into our "civi" clothes, as we call them, and drove to IHOP instead. I got pepper and onion hash browns and coffee, and we talked about our favorite holidays and Jasmine and I had a contest where we tried to see who could compliment each other the most and in the most obnoxious fashion. When we ran out of normal stuff to compliment, we started praising things like the way each others'  heels looked in her sandals. it was fun and uplifting at first, but it made everyone want to punch us in the face. The rain made us all a little hazy. After IHOP I took a two hour nap. I've been sleeping so much lately, it's weird. I can take a three hour nap and go to...

i just got back from the Americorps "drag show", and it was the funniest thing I've seen in a long time. Jasmine and Ian somehow got Grant to put on Jasmine's romper and perform a Queen song on stage. The romper was so short you could see his boxers, which amazingly matched the romper perfectly. My team was crying laughing the whole time. Grant struggles with social anxiety (which you would never guess about him, people are always surprising me). He is very open about it, and always  makes choices requiring him to put himself out there. He's always the first one  volunteering to speak for our team in group settings and is always challenging himself into new social situations. This is incredibly inspiring to me, and I hope that he knows every day how wonderful and impact he makes on all of the people around him. Another guy named Travis dressed in a sheer lace shirt, tight jeans, and glitter heels and performed Praying by Ke$ha. He got so into the performance that ...

Happy Friday! I woke up in a great mood this morning and have been trying to ride that out all day. My mama sent me a lovely package this morning and a cute little note that made me smile (thanks, mama, i love u very much). Our room is a disaster zone because we have to be all packed up by 1 pm today, which is in an hour, despite the fact we're not leaving until Monday. I think all my stuff is pretty much ready to go. I've already been complimented multiple times since being here on my packing skills, which is a bit surprising to me. Maybe it's all those years of impromptu trips to Vermont, where I didn't have much time to think about what I needed and got used to the low maintenance lifestyle. Anyway, it's nice that what I view as a last minute, thoughtless mess of a process, others view as organizational finesse. We had our real induction today, which was an exact replica of what we did yesterday for 2 hours. Except this time there were real guest speakers who a...

HOW IS IT NOVEMBER ALREADY? I can't believe I've been here for almost three weeks already, though it already feels like so much longer. Tomorrow is the last day of training before I officially become an inducted Americorps member! Today, we had a dress rehearsal where we had to wear our AmeriTux (white polo shirt, black cargo pants, combat boots) and practice standing in a line and saying the Americorps pledge. Riveting stuff. We're leaving for Florida on Monday, and I'm continuously baffled by how quickly time is passing. I'm starting to get very accustomed to my life here in Sacramento, and now it's time to pick up and move! I love this program so far for many reasons, but particularly because I think it's helping me reduce my sense of attachment to things. I can't become attached to the idea I'm going anywhere or doing anything in particular. I can't predict where I will be in a week or a month. As Mike put so wisely this morning, I must becom...

It's WEDNESDAY and I ain't feelin too hot! I got back from the bar last night at around 2:30, and then we got woken up at 5 for a firedrill and had training all morning. I can't really complain, because I inflicted this upon myself, and had a great night so I guess it's worth it. It all balances out, don't it. My makeshift frat bro costume was a big hit. Ian let me borrow his snapback, Shaggy Mike let me borrow one of his frat shirts, and Keeley lent me her white tube socks. I put the shirt over my Americorps Polo so I had a collar, and rocked the Americorps cargo shorts (definitely everybody's favorite part of the costume). I ultra-committed to my role as frat bro and made myself a lot of friends for it. All I really had to do was brag about how many natty lights I could chug in 15 seconds, give lots of daps, say "Sawwwww, dudeeeee???"and tell a bunch of girls that I wasn't like "other guys." This one guy I was talking to was so thrilled...

So, Mike notified us at dinner that we are most likely going to Florida to help with Hurricane Irma instead of Texas. He said this is still subject to change, and we won't know for sure where we are going until we actually end up there and unpack our stuff because that's the nature of this program and we must learn adaptability and all that jazz. I'm cool with it. I've never been to Florida, and I'm sure there will be some interesting stuff there, and lots of people that need lots of helpin'. So, on Monday we will start our six day journey towards Florida, I guess? Or somewhere entirely different, who knows! Six days in Geraldine, that big smelly clunky dark green van, with the 13 of us squished side by side should be very interesting... Pray we still like each other by the end :)))) Here's to the unpredictable, ~~DEedra

Happy Monday! I've barely had a moment to myself in almost a week now and am incredibly sleep deprived, but things are starting to wind down a bit. Saturday was "Make a Difference Day," so Green 5 went on over to a local community garden that was run by the kindest people on earth. The moment we got there, a friendly old man offered us fresh pomegranates that he picked right off the tree. We snacked on strawberries and raspberries in the shade of the palm trees before we began weeding. As we worked, the owners kept encouraging us to take breaks to eat the donuts and fresh fruit they set out for us (obviously I didn't hesitate). It was such a pleasant, easy-going morning. My biggest stress was trying to figure out answers to the riddles Roy was giving us. I have a feeling I'll be solving a lot of riddles in the next ten months. After lunch, our team was transferred at another community garden that was nothing like the first. There had to be about 100 corps membe...