Ok, it's been awhile...a year and a half? Might be the longest I've gone between posts. Sorry! I will try to start updating again more often ... but no promises. I'm planning to clean my room today though, and in the spirit both of settling in and procrastinating, a blog update seemed like a good idea.

Obviously a lot has happened since my last post ... I did indeed spend time in far southern Israel at Kibbutz Lotan for their Green Apprenticeship permaculture program and a couple months after for volunteering ... finished my year in Israel with Dorot, spent the summer at Camp Wise again, this time as Head of Trips and Teva ... and then spent the fall at the Isabella Freedman Center in CT working as a Jewish environmental educator with the Teva Learning Center. Then I spent a few months back at Schweitzer Mountain in Idaho, working a second season as a ski instructor. It was all really great!

I also met an incredible girl named Abby. We've been together for a bit over a year now, and it's going swell. So that's another thing that happened.

What else has happened and where am I now? Follow the jump!


Ok. So.

I live in a really awesome beautiful farmhouse in Reisterstown, MD.

Sounds kind of random, I know. It isn't as much as you might think.

As I drew towards the end of fall Teva, I started thinking about where to be next. I had calculated, not long before then, that since graduating college in 2006, I had moved an average of once every four months. Yep, every four months. Not as often as some, sure, but still quite often I think, and this went on for a good four years. I've never actually been the type of person who gets antsy being in one place for too long and must move or go crazy. I actually like staying in one place (I think...it sounds nice anyway). It's just that for all the places I have wanted to spend time in, the work I've wanted to be doing, and communities I've been looking for, I've had to move around a lot. But it was wearing on me, and I was really looking for something that would allow me a bit more stability and settled-ness.

Enter: Kayam Farm, a Jewish educational farm based at the Pearlstone Conference and Retreat Center. I had come across Kayam a couple times in my online research of what existed in the Jewish environmental world, and had started seriously considering spending time here back last summer, especially as there was a chance I would be spending a year in Rwanda working at a youth village as their main farm guy, and I wanted to boost up my farm experience. (I did not end up going to Rwanda, for a lot of reasons. Yes, I would really still like to go for a shorter visit, but I feel really good about that decision)

So, long story short, I started talking to folks at Kayam, including the director, and through framing my background in the right way and continuously expressing my huge desire to be at Kayam and make it happen however I could, managed to get hired to replace the outgoing Education Director, Casey Yurow. I moved out here in March, spend the spring working with Casey, learning the ropes and transitioning, and then assumed his position when Casey left in June.

So now, I've been in this new role for just over a month. It's been wonderful, challenging, inspiring and generally awesome. I've been metaphorically shuffling and re-organizing things in my head, digitially re-organizing things on the server so that they make sense to my brain, and physically re-organizing both the office itself, and have also moved rooms in the farmhouse. This afternoon I'll make the final push (for now) to really get myself moved in. I've kind of been procrastinating on that one (I'm sure that's really surprising).

We have a great group of Kayam Summer Fellows working with us on the farm at at neighboring JCC Camp Milldale. I've been given the opportunity to work with them as their educational mentor, observing and giving feedback on their lessons at camp and helping them develop and grow as educators, and am excited to see this continue through the summer. Our Kayam Summer Kollel is off to a flourishing and invigorating start (see their blog Here) and there are some exciting programs coming up.

And, I'm gonna be here for at least another year. No moving again for quite some time. That's exciting. And Abby lives in DC, less than 1.5 hrs away. Yes!

Hopefully, another post soon. Thanks for reading!