From the ecstatic moment a person arrives at Holden Village, an iconic retreat center located in the heart of Washington’s North Cascades Mountains that offers visitors a unique opportunity to step into the wilderness they are greeted with a “Hosti”. This person designs a sign with your name on it to welcome you to the village and answer any questions you may have. From the moment the school bus with Holden Village written on the side was in sight of the village entrance all the way to the time I stepped off said bus I was greeted by most, if not all, of the village waving at me and cheering for my arrival. Before even getting to the village I was required to complete a Child Safety Training which is crucial to the safety, comfort, and well-being of the children that reside in Holden Village.  I realized that I’ve been […]

It’s now been almost a week that I’ve been at the Grunewald Guild here in the mountains of Washington state, and I’m thoroughly excited for the months ahead. I’m staying in what’s called the Riverhouse, as it directly overlooks the river flowing 50 feet away from the back porch. This porch is one of my favourite places so far to sit and enjoy the area, as it’s fully screened in to keep the bugs away (mosquitos remain my arch-nemesis) and is beautifully lit with string lights in the evenings. The quiet rush of the flowing water is a constant and peaceful sound, and a wide range of birds fill the trees and air with their calls too. (There’s one critter that makes a fascinating little clicking sound sometimes and I can never find it, but it intrigues me.) I was surprised by how windy it gets here in the side […]

My first week of internship at Opportunity Enterprises was successfully completed this Friday and I am already looking forward to coming back after the weekend! Opportunity Enterprises offers inclusive opportunities for work, transportation, leisure, among other opportunities, for people of all abilities, opening doors to a more equitable and fairer world. In this first week I met incredible people, felt extremely welcome, felt a good sense of home, and learned valuable lessons. This first week of training included several lessons, such as First Aid (CPR) and Crisis Prevention (CPI), which are essential for ensuring the well-being of the children who will be spending the summer with us. However, what was most significant for me was learning about the company’s history, how it arose and why. For many years, people with disabilities were neglected, excluded and mistreated, kept in isolation within institutions with no intention of re-socialization and under abusive “treatments”. […]

The unflinching memorist Dorothy Allison writes, “Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that telling a story all the way through is an act of love.” A thorough and full accounting is indeed an act of love, and even an act of service.    Following a meaningful spring break service trip in northwest Indiana several weeks ago, I might amend Allison’s formulation a bit further: telling a story all the way through is an act of love and service…and so is attending to that story–listening compassionately, for understanding, and then figuring out what it means to hold and carry that story forward.    In a week spent criss-crossing northwest Indiana and south-southwest Chicagoland, we (Anna and Kat from the Institute for Leadership and Service) joined eight Valpo students on a journey to hear story after story–some ecology, some art, some history, some activism, some […]

I have seen a saying around campus in the past few weeks, in the Student Life Administration window, in the Valparaiso University Center for the Arts Box Office: “Fall is proof that change is beautiful.”  It’s true, fall is beautiful.  However, I was thinking that perhaps we need the reminder by way of a catchy saying because we don’t often feel that change is beautiful.  In fact, it can be downright scary. Everywhere I turn, people are reflecting on change.  The Institute’s Listening for Purpose podcast Season 2 Episode 2, an interview with Valpo senior Reahlyn Bryce (which was released on November 12, 2024), is all about change and beauty in inspiring songs.  Reahlyn and Listening for Purpose host, senior Simeon Klepac, discuss the impending transition facing seniors as they finish out their time at Valpo and make plans for the future. Whenever I attend higher education conferences, colleagues discuss […]

Twenty-one Octobers ago, I was a college student hovering over one of life’s many threshold moments, poised between what seemed at the time like teenager-hood on one side…and the yawning gap of “adulting” beyond. It was fall of my junior year at the University of South Carolina (yes, Go Gamecocks and especially their women’s basketball team, but I digress). Beginning my fifth semester of college, I found myself right at that halfway moment in college where things start to seem more real and people begin to ask you a little more about what you might actually do after graduation.  And I….I did not feel like myself at all. I felt like I was trudging through molasses. Everything seemed foggy and gray, as though I was peering through a grimy, smudged window at other people, who cheerfully and purposefully strode through sunlit spaces, while I remained ineluctably apart, unable to access […]

I would like to invite you into a journaling activity this week.  We at the Institute for Leadership and Service like to promote reflection.  We think of it as a muscle we can exercise.  You know, how strong muscles are just kind of “nice to have” until one day when you need to move a couch or pick up a child, and then those muscles become absolutely necessary.  Similarly, reflection may seem superfluous, until the day we kind of just need to know what we think about a subject. OK, the reflection activity.  Get out a writing instrument and your journal, or a piece of paper, or the back of a napkin. First, write down where you are from.  You decide if that means, city, state, country, etc, but I mean a geographical place. Next, think of something about that place that is meaningful to you.  Spend a little time […]

Over the course of this summer and my internship at Erie House, one thing has became ever more clear to me each time I wake up and head to work: any number of individually insignificant factors can decide whether or not it’ll feel like a good day. For example, it could be cloudy but not raining, my bus is on time, and I have an extra minute to grab coffee before I clock in. That’s already a good day. Just as much, if it’s raining without an umbrella, both of my bus rides get delayed, and I have to show up twenty minutes late, that’s kind of a rough start. Any one of those single elements shouldn’t be enough to make or break a day, but taken together, they pile up quickly. And, of course, that’s just the first hour or two of your standard weekday. If you’re in the […]

As my internship continues, I continue looking for a purpose big enough to dominate my life. I’ve always loved reading and since childhood, narratives of grand proportions filled my head, so much so that I’ve come to expect my purpose to be similar to the same characters that had populated my life. Frequently I find myself looking for a purpose big enough to dominate my own life or appear on some metaphorical horizon. I had expected to see something like a summer thunderhead marching across the sky, or maybe something far away but with a promise of grandeur like the Chicago skyline as seen from the Indiana Dunes National Park. This summer, and especially the CAPS internship has set my mind on a future that I am typically happy to ignore. My previous blog post mainly talked about my refusal to truly think about vocation in a real sense, but […]

Today is my last day of my CAPS summer fellowship at Heartland Alliance. I look around the office. It’s quiet, a normal Friday morning as people mostly elect to work remotely before the weekend. Regardless, while everyone goes about their day, I sit here reflecting on some of the things I have learned this summer about both the work I have gotten to be a part of in refugee resettlement and as part of a non-profit at large in Chicago, IL. I once asked my supervisor the question, “how does Heartland approach the problems it wants to solve?”, and she gave me an answer I did not expect. For those that may not be familiar, Heartland Alliance’s mission is to resettle newly arrived refugees and immigrants in Chicagoland with the goal of helping them to become self-sufficient. My question about its “approach” could have yielded a number of answers.  Her […]

‘I don’t know.’: the response that never feels good enough. Whether it is an answer to what you want, why you started, or what you plan for the future, few leave a conversation satisfied when you say ‘I don’t know’. But I, personally, don’t know a lot of things. I am a very indecisive person; I like to do a lot of things, and I don’t mind doing a lot of things, so, while some people might call me a people pleaser, I would say I’m just really adaptable. I want what others want because I would be content with either. Being so flexible is great a lot of the time; I’m reliable, understanding, good at sharing, good at listening, good at conflict resolution, and the list goes on. But that also means, I have a hard time setting boundaries, and don’t always receive the same grace I give others. […]

As a result of my time ending at Jacob’s Ladder, I have been given a chance to shift my focus from getting the most out of my experience to reflecting on everything that I’ve learned and what it means. Throughout my summer at Jacob’s Ladder, I had the pleasure of learning many lessons, though the ones that stick out the most to me are the ability to walk into new experiences with an open mind and heart and not to put too much emphasis on my expectations.  I believe that it’s completely normal to have expectations and a mental checklist of things that we want to accomplish when entering a new environment or experience. It’s a way to hold ourselves accountable and a way to maximize what we’re learning. Even though having expectations is essentially inevitable, I have come to realize that expectations can limit us and put us in […]

A lot of people think that I am a shy person. But really, I am just an anxious person, and that results in me thinking and rethinking through any possible implications and consequences of any actions or words before doing or saying them. And when I do not pre-think through them, I will post-think through them afterwards. Or both, which can really slow an interaction. Shockingly enough, that kind of hesitation comes across as shy. As I have gotten older and worked on it, this pattern of thinking and hesitation have been steadily decreasing. And this summer specifically, I have gotten to practice a new mentality surrounding social interaction that has really helped. It started at the beginning of the summer. On maybe my second day, one of my supervisors took me to a meeting with her where she was planning an awareness event with a few other representatives of […]

Just like at Valpo, the Grünewald Guild has a walking labyrinth outside, just beyond their central building and right next to the river. Anyone can use it at any point of the day, or night even. I actually heard from someone that they went out to walk it at night and stargaze. We use it during our final Vespers service of each program week too; to meditate on all the things we’ve learned from the week, to center ourselves and find a few minutes of peace and quiet inside our busy bodies. This last week, I started to really pay attention to how the labyrinth walk made me feel in the moment. It’s a triple-spiral, which can mean a lot of things to people depending on their spiritualities, but as you move through the labyrinth, you pass by the spirals you already walked. I’ve been doing a lot of personal […]

As of late July, I have served as a Communications Intern at Grünewald Guild in Leavenworth, WA for two months as part of my placement as a member of the CAPS Fellows Program. Through working in this position, I have exponentially grown to further refine my vision for my vocation as I approach the final year of my academic career at Valparaiso University. The mission of the guild is highlighted through the three core values of art, faith, and community and, since I am a Music and English major, I initially thought I would gravitate my attention mostly towards the value of art during my time here. Surprisingly, that was not that case and I started to primarily focus upon the aspect of community involvement and how it uniquely manifests itself at this non-profit organization. By nature, I have more of an introverted demeanor and it often takes me a […]

Reconnecting with my high school viola teacher after three years brought up her valid question of, “Any updates with what you want to do with your life?” When I replied, “Well, I want to apply for programs to study or teach in another country for a year… Then possibly grad school for something ‘international’…” we both had to pause and laugh; nothing had changed in the three years since we’d last talked. I still didn’t have a set plan. Driving home that afternoon to get back to work with the Valparaiso International Center (VIC), I questioned everything. Why I still didn’t know, why I still didn’t have everything figured out. The following day, my CAPS interview project changed my perspective on everything. For my CAPS interview, I met with Hugh McGuigan, VIC Board President but also a Valparaiso University legend, and hearing about his adventures and international experiences made me […]