Excited to wake up

The best part about my life right now is that I am way excited to wake up in the morning and go to work.  You know how when you are really excited for something you wake up WAY before your alarm and are ready to go before it is even time?  Well that is me every morning.  I have been waking up way before my alarm every morning and just want to jump out of bed and go to work.  It's crazy, but so wonderful.  And we've only been doing training so far, but even that is exciting.

Yesterday we had Anti-Oppression and Liberation training with a professor of Social Work at the University of Washington who is also super involved in the Coalition of Anti-Racist Whites.  It was so awesome.  Then we did training on providing Strength Based Services (focusing on the strengths of the youth) with the former director of Seattle Youth Garden Works.  Also pretty awesome.  I haven't been this intellectually stimulated in a while, and it is so good.

Then today we had our site orientation.  We started out in the garden (which I had not seen until this morning).  I met my direct supervisor (who is super cool) and got a tour of the garden.  Then we did some harvesting with the 2 lead gardeners.  We are in between crews right now.  The next group of kids starts in about a week.  But there are 2 kids that stay on from the previous season as lead gardeners.  So they were in the garden with us this morning harvesting.  The garden is really beautiful and everything was growing so nicely.  GIANT tomatoes and zucchini and beans.  I tried a lemon cucumber for the first time ever, it was really good.  Then the afternoon was spent in the office.  I met the director of SYGW and she did an excellent, detailed orientation/overview for us.  It is such a small office (3 full time staff), but they do such great work on such limited resources.  I appreciated her honesty and openness with us about both the strengths and challenges of the agency.  It made us feel like a part of the team and like we could have a part in everything.  It also gave us some background and context in which to do our work.  I am very much a big picture person, so this was very helpful for me and will be as I do my day to day tasks.

The biggest thing right now is just that I am so excited about life.  I really can't remember the last time I was this happy for this long of a time.  And I really don't see myself coming down from the excitement any time soon.  Not saying that this stuff is not hard and will not be hard, and not saying that being about 3,000 from almost everybody I love is easy, and not saying that the world has stopped being awful.  But within all of this, I have joy and excitement each day.  I feel good about where I am, not because I can make changes in the world or save anybody, but because I actually feel like this is where I am supposed to be right now, for lot's of reasons.  I think AND feel that it is the best thing for me to be here and doing this right now.  This is good and it is where I am supposed to be for this season of my life and I am happy and excited and I have already learned so much and will only continue to learn even more.  So so good.