Work: Professional, Relational, Communal

I am sitting outside on our back deck (I live with a housemate) in the blazing sun, couldn't be more happy with our local East Bay climate right now!

I had an interview yesterday with a homeless shelter for families, mainly female head-of-household.  The job would involve running the career center and providing individual career assessment and counseling, as well as other enrichment activities to build confidence, self-awareness, and life balance.

The positives:  considerable creative license in terms of activities and tools, would use my strongest skills of counseling/training/creativity, and the program director seems really cool.

Negatives: my own confidence is not super high working with this population mainly because I haven't done it before (will I be competent in establishing trust and credibility?), the environment sounds like it is often crisis-driven and intense, and it doesn't sound like they have a lot of well-established structure/resources in place for career readiness/education purposes.

The interview seemed to go well overall, and she said I would hear back in a few weeks.  Just getting an interview in the first place feels encouraging and I appreciate the opportunity to keep my skills sharp.

In other news, dialogue continues with R.  So I guess his relationship was really on the outs. . .Since last posting he has found an apartment and plans to move later this month.  He asked about my trip to Oregon for my brother's wedding the weekend of March 19th.  I said I had thought about basically coming for the weekend since I was clear I didn't want to see him if he was in a relationship.  Right.

But since he won't be, then the possibility of us spending time together is opened up.   We both agreed that if we get together, we would like it to be for several days so that we have time to reconnect, relax, and talk through things in an unrushed way.

We have continued to have "processing" conversations, which I don't want to get into right now, but I did share more of my feelings, including that I am angry and sad with my own choices and abilities at the time.  I still carry some guilt of my own.

I would love to have a spiritual leader to talk with right now and be given some sort of amends or penance to perform as a process of working through guilt and receiving forgiveness.  I'm not really a religious person,  though am very spiritual, but sometimes I would like more structure and guidance around these things.  Anyway, just trying to stay in the moment with it all.

Friday night, we are having another meeting of my "Heart and Soul" Transition Towns Group, with whom I did the Work that Reconnects workshop.  This is our second official meeting and potluck, and I look forward to connecting more with these folks - to talking about possibilities of how to build heart connections.  And how to support ourselves and the larger community around transitioning to a more local/sustainable way of living.