I swear my life changes every second. When I finally get in front of a computer to update this thing so many things have already happened and feelings felt that sometimes I wonder what's the point of blogging at all. .... But no worries: I love to share and I LOVE to write so I eventually don't stay gone for too long.

Last Wednesday and Thursday I attended a youth worker's conference and I've been on a high ever since. I've attended plenty of conferences and far too many have dry impersonal icebreakers and for some reason put me in an antisocial place. But on Thursday I deviated from a workshop that was chosen for me and found myself joining Telling Our Stories which was facilitated by an amazing woman named Justice.

We started the workshop by forming a circle, saying our names and organization and sharing with the group the last time we wrote in our journals. Some shared simply the time of their last journal writing and others went into what they wrote about. What this icebreaker did was immediately create the sense of a safe community-- a place where our feelings and insights could be shared without fear and hesitation. One man from City Year shared that the last time he wrote in his journal he thought about his grandfather and his unrelenting commitment to service. At that moment an intense sense of self and purpose penetrated me. All my life I have always felt the need to help others and simply hearing the guy from City Year express his commitment out loud caused mine to become more real.

Justice asked us all to pick one ancestor card, internalize the word written on the front of it and share why we thought out of all the cards on the table we ended up with the ones in our hands. Many people in the circle were tripped out by the word the word they chose. One older woman had the word courage and shared with us that she always thought of herself as a courageous person because where she grew up being afraid and unsure wasn't an option. Receiving the word courage shook her up because she's in a place in her life right now where she is afraid and is facing various issues that she's uncertain she can rise above.

My word was serenity- something that I wish to truly reach one day.

Taped to the various walls of the room were large sheets of paper with the words: love, spirituality, power and I think peace. Justice asked everyone to gravitate towards the word that means something to them and to collectively create a poem. Due to various things going on in my life right now I was drawn to love. My group decided to simply write down whatever came to mind when we thought of love. In the end we created a free flowing poem that was perfection. One woman ended the poem by stating that "it's all we need" and spontaneously started to sing Mary J's Love is All We Need. We were all shocked to see this white teacher in her mid to late forties belting out word for word one of the Queen of R&B's classics.

I will be forever affected by that workshop and the people I met that day. It's rare to get a group of folks to step outside their comfort zones and that day we connected far beyond being youth workers and more as people.