The League of Young Voters

For four months I, and 30+ other folks, will be residents of Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. We are long-term volunteers, some for only four months and others for 8 or even 12 months. We are lawyers, recent college graduates, non-profit administrators, ex-Ph.D students, mediators and, above all, folks who are finding our way through the confines and freedom of working at one of the nation’s leading retreat and renewal centers. We work in the kitchen cutting vegetables, in offices doing data-entry, outside – plowing now and mowing soon, and assisting the over 500 guests that are regularly in-house with finding their way around the maze of our building.

My ‘blog will be about my experiences at Kripalu Center – the joys, the lows, the crying jags and the wonder of watching god emerge through the blossoming of the flowers. I will talk about my hikes, my weekends away, the monthly volunteer cake and the parties. I will try to detail the physical, spiritual and emotional changes that happen to me throughout these months.

To read more of Kate’s adventures, click here.

My back-to-the-land parents wished to embrace the rural lifestyle as much as possible, so they moved from New York to a town of about 900 people in central Maine. Here they lived a peaceful existence as tree and vegetable farmers; they raised sheep and guinea fowl; they adopted a retired racehorse and – until the barn-raising – kept it in a stall attached to the house. I suppose that to them, trying to be self-sufficient was unquestionable after living in New York. In Maine, they are blessed with the land with which to grow and nurture food, the neighbors willing to lend a hand to a couple of greenhorns, and a community in which sharing is both a way of life and a necessity.

It was in this atmosphere that my brother and I came into the world and enjoyed our childhood. We were reared with an interesting conglomeration of values inherited from the community: part small-town conservatism (after all, we were the only people who lived on the Day Road whose last name wasn’t “Day”), and part drum-circle, potluck-party, mantra-chanting liberalism (a.k.a. my parents and their friends). But it didn’t take long for me to realize that a great mixture of these disparate types of folks often came together, cooperated, and even agreed – and not just at the annual home brew contest.