At Long Last
After 7 years of following every other path, I have come back to where I knew I would end up: becoming a teacher. I may not have taken the full road I thought I would, and there is no way I could have anticipated the journey I was about to take when I declined acceptance in the MAT Program at Lewis & Clark College in 2010.
It was about a year and a half after I had graduated from L&C, and I had just returned from a stint in AmeriCorps VISTA, fundraising for Habitat for Humanity in Hawaii. I was talking with the new Dean of Students, and he strongly encouraged me to enter the MAT Program at L&C’s graduate school. He wasn’t lying when he said that it was the best program in the area. I researched lots of programs in the Portland area, and for High School Social Studies, it beat out even the elite Arbor School. But, there was one fact he failed to share with me: graduate school at Lewis & Clark had little to no scholarship support for students. And, with undergraduate tuition hikes getting locked into a 7% annual increase, I knew that another 25k in debt would just not work for me. Something within me knew that I needed to gain more life experience, try out other careers, travel more, and become more of a whole adult before I put myself in front of a classroom of 30 teenagers. No one has ever been able to adequately answer the timeless question: why should an 18 year old listen to a 22 year old as if they are an authority?
So I declined the letter of offer in the program, and threw myself to the winds of the Portland job market. If you’ve met me anytime in the last 7 years, it’s likely you’ve heard me winge about my unlucky career prospects there, from part time nonprofit fundraising/firefighting to contract jobs ad nauseam. I became severely burnt out on nonprofit work, and a bad commuter bike accident shook me up enough in 2011 to make me shift my professional life entirely.
After all my education and social erudition had brought me (seemingly nothing), I chose to sell my labor as a landscaper, starting within my Quaker community. And I did not want to just chill with odd jobs: I wanted to get some education out of the experience, so to challenge myself, I made it into a bona-fide business, EarthQuaker Enterprises. I had so much encouragement from my friends and clients at Multnomah Meeting, that for a long while I thought maybe I had found my calling. I had been given the opportunity to lead the High School Quaker youth group at the meeting, and it seemed like it should have been a perfect balance of physical work and educational work, blending body and mind work with soul.
But, over these last few years, a hard truth has been emerging for me: my body is not built for landscaping work. I’ve resisted this idea so much that I still have a hard time letting go of the idea of physical labor entirely. I’ve really enjoyed learning how to prune every kind of tree, how to climb them, and how to take care of plants with skill over time and seasons. But I now need to come to terms with two pinched rotator cuffs, scoliosis, and other health problems that crop up perennially more regularly than bluebells. It is time I laid down my saw and shovel, and picked up a pen again. In fact, it’s been so long, I now need to realize that I need to pick up a laptop and start typing out a lesson plan. For myself.
Did I anticipate going to graduate school in Eugene, Oregon? Nope, never crossed my mind, until 6 months ago. That is when I met a woman who would change my life for the better, in a dramatically fast, Spirit-guided way: Promise Partner. Yep, that’s her name, and she burst into my life at the start of 2015 in love and God-filled Presence. Yes! We fell in love, we are in love, and within the last 6 months I quit my full time landscaping job in Olympia, moved to Eugene, and got into an MAT Program at Pacific University in Eugene. So now I am here, waiting for school to start, and waiting for my brain to deal with the whiplash of physical culture shock. No longer is every day filled with manual labor. Now, every day is filled with ideas, and learning, rigorous, quantifiable learning. I can’t wait for school to start.
electric hush 