Once upon a time, there was a girl who grew up in New York City. This girl was a bit unusual because she had a rather severe case of nature deficit disorder and really needed to be around trees. As you might know if you’ve been to that particular city, trees are somewhat hard to come by outside of Central Park, and this girl did not live anywhere near Manhattan. Surprisingly, the girl understood her strange predicament and left the city as soon as she was able to go to college in upstate New York. She followed her dream across the country and became a forest ecologist in Seattle.
“But wait” you say, “isn’t this blog about fiber and all things fibery?” “What is this story about forest ecologists?” Well, my dear readers, you are indeed correct. For the past two years, I have stayed true to my mission of creating a blog that shares my love of fiber and hopefully teaches some useful tidbits along the way. However, in my last post I mentioned that there are some big changes happening in my life this year, so this particular blog post is going to be about life. Don’t worry, I have two wonderful fibery posts already planned for the near future, so our regularly scheduled programming will return very shortly!
To continue on with our narrative, most of my readers probably don’t know that I’m a forest ecologist by day, spinner and knitter by night. For the past 10 years since I’ve graduated with my Master’s degree, I’ve worked for a number of government and non-profit organizations. I’ve worked for the local county government and the US Forest Service to name a few. My dream, after graduating from grad school, was to work with local communities and help them to restore their urban forests to a healthy and sustainable state. I wanted to help to defeat the scourge of invasive plants that are taking over our forests and to create thriving communities of native plants. I was very clear about what I wanted to do with my life, and that is why I was able to achieve my goal. For the past six years, I have been a consultant at a local non-profit and have indeed worked with most of the local cities and many community groups to plan and monitor the restoration of urban forests in the Puget Sound back to health.
In fact, I was so busy living this dream that I didn’t hear my heart whispering to me that it was time to move on and do something new. I was no longer happy at my job, but I kept telling myself that everything was great and this was what I wanted to do. The fact was that I was tired. My commute was getting worse by the day and I was getting more and more stressed out at work. It was time I faced the truth.
And then one day, I realized something new and surprising. We aren’t meant to have one dream for our entire life. We are meant to achieve our dreams and then to move on to something new and different, so that we can learn about a new facet of ourselves and grow. It is our society that is sick because it gets stuck in old ways of thinking and requires people to pick one thing and then do it their whole life. It doesn’t make much sense, but I almost became a victim to this type of thinking myself.
So I made a totally reasonable but somewhat strange decision. In December, I gave notice at my job. I did so knowing full well that we are in a pretty bad economy and that jobs for ecologists are very scarce in the best of times. I made a conscious decision to leave a really great non-profit where I felt respected and supported and a job I was pretty good at. And as it turned out, three days after I gave notice, my job went away because we lost our biggest client. Coincidence? You decide.
It took me until the end of February to leave because there were a lot of loose ends to tie up. And for the past month I have been doing something that I haven’t done since middle school – enjoying a well earned sabbatical. It’s been very interesting to see how things have developed over the past month. I had no plans to do anything except knit and spin. One thing I’ve noticed is that without a set schedule, I’ve been sleeping a lot. I’m clearly unwinding from many years of sleep deprivation. It’s been great to have the freedom to go to yoga during the day, which I’ve been taking advantage of. I’ve been doing a lot of cooking, gardening and I’m learning to play the classical guitar. And much to my surprise, I haven’t been doing a lot of knitting or spinning until the past week.
Many friends and relatives have been asking me what I’m planning next. Frankly, I don’t really know. I’m going to take some time off and regroup. One thing I feel very strongly is that whatever I do next must allow me to use my creative side a lot more. I’m also not really inclined to go back and work a full time office job. In other words, we’ll see what my heart tells me to do. I’ll keep you all posted as I learn more myself!
As a parting thought, here’s a little ode to forest ecology that my husband and I came up with a few weeks ago. I hope you enjoy it 
