The end!

I've been home for nearly a week already!

My term of service with AmeriCorps NCCC closed with an unexpectedly strong prescription of graduation goggles. I knew it would be hard to say goodbye seeing as I had spent the last nine months of my life living and working with the same beautiful humans, but I was shocked by the abruptness of the end.

We all expected it and in many ways, we were all ready to go home. I missed my partner and my bed and my books and everything else that means home to me. I was prepared for the bandaid rip of graduation and a flight home in the same 5 hour span, but I guess I wasn't necessarily prepared for the actual implications of what we referred to - like so many things by acronym - as LAA. (...Life After AmeriCorps).

In the corps, you're constantly surrounded by a community of people who share - sometimes in unknowable and unclear ways - your desire to make the world a better place. Not everyone joins the program for the same reason, many leave, but those who graduated last Thursday: we were a unique collection of people in the same place for the same reason. Basically, we didn't know what else to do with our lives... just kidding, but also seriously, I think many of us saw AmeriCorps as a beautiful way to connect with that part of our childhood selves that wanted to save the world, even if our adultish realism and possible cynicism fought back the entire time.

Things were not always perfect; but in the end, I had traveled to some incredible, awe-inspiring places, worked alongside passionate and inspiring people, planted my fair-share of native and vegetable plants, improved some soil, helped build a house, lived in a yurt..in a forest, camped on an island, bunked in the honors dorm with the California Conservation Corps ladies, and - most importantly - I had made some lifelong connections with people who will always make me smile and people who taught me new things everyday.

My whole life, I've heard: "college will be/is/was the best time of your life." I disagree. I think I will always look back on my experience in the National Civilian Community Corps as the best time in my life. I hope to use my experiences along with the lessons I've learned to continually make the world - if only my own community - a better place.

Thank you to everyone who made my journey what it was.