Place Corps Friday Digest: Awake

Breathing [Photo: Martha Snow, Design Fellow

It's Friday!

It's April! There are flowers! The sky is sometimes blue and sometimes there are clouds. All of which to say, these are strange and wild times and yet there is growth and moments of beauty to appreciate all the more. Let's shower each other with tenderness and care.

This past week, Dawn Breeze offered the first exercise in mapping purpose to be continued on Monday with the next exercise.  Residents are tending to the garden and now have a care schedule. The spinach is lovingly uncovered to catch some rays during the day and covered for a cool night. Seedling propagation continues in the Hawthorne Valley greenhouse. The 2019 cohort yearbook is underway to encapsulate the incredible learning developed throughout this year. Next week is our revised spring break! Although many plans have had to shift, we hope this break from classes offers a chance to rest, recharge, and come back ready to finish out the program with as much lightness and joy as we can. 

Our word for week is AWAKE. What does it mean to be awake right now? The colors of the landscape are changing as more buds appear; what is waking up inside and around us? We are reminded of a quote by Clarice Lispector, "The world's continual breathing is what we hear and call silence." Come back to the breath. What does it mean to awake? 
 

“ Hold on to yourself/ because I'm rocketing back up/ from depths I've created/ on the way to a star/ I've only begun to imagine/ and you can come with."
― Sam Pink