(Originally posted: August 6, 2011) Here it is–my last day at Holy Wisdom Monastery and with the Benedictine Women of Madison. This morning we had our last morning walk between Oak House (where us volunteers are housed) to the monastery, admiring the black eye susans and the cup flowers along the way. Everything, from our last centering prayer and our last morning prayer times, to floating the rubber duckies in the baptismal font, seemed a little surreal since it felt as if we would be doing the same thing once again tomorrow. The last few days have been filled with spreading …

(Originally posted: August 3, 2011) So here I am–hot, sweaty, slightly dehydrated, with dirt under my nails and an odd rash appearing on my arm. And I’m loving it!  While the days have been a lot hotter than expected, we have done a lot of restoration work in the prairie, weeded, pruned, and picked in the garden and surrounding orchards, and lobbed off a fair amount of prairie wood brush. This afternoon a naturalist who started the monastery’s restoration project came to give us a tour. We picked various seeds both for replanting and also for sharing with other restoration projects around the area.  While …

(Originally posted: July 31, 2011) For the next week I have returned to Holy Wisdom Monastery to participate in their Volunteer in Community (VIC) program. I was a part of their program for seven weeks in 2009 as part of my seminary field education requirement, and now I’m back for a short week as a means to recoup from my last year of seminary, a year of stressful (though amazing) internships and jobs, and three and a half years of the “what ifs” of graduate student life. And I’m really grateful to be back. While one of my internships and one …