hard to believe

"Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer. What is your problem with hard to believe?"
--Pi Patel in Life of Pi when told his story is 'hard to believe'

So, I finally finished reading Life of Pi...it took me forever because I lost it, then Jeff found it under the couch (I swear I looked there;) and I finished it yesterday. That was my favorite quote from the end.

Speaking of hard to believe, school is over! It ended on Thursday for the students. The last day was pretty fun. There was an awards assembly, and a mass. At the end of mass, Sister Leonette had all the teachers stand in front and she thanked us for a great year. She had the 7th graders (now 8th graders!) present little gifts to all the teachers. Then, she started talking about me and how I'm leaving and had one of the students present another gift to me. It was really sweet.

When I got back to my desk I saw that all the teachers had signed the card and I almost started crying. What they all said in the card was so nice. They also gave me a frame with Santa Cruz in it and a Chili's gift card. It was still hard to believe it was my last day there and I wouldn't be seeing these amazing kids and working with these incredible teachers ever again! During recess I went out with the kids to see them one last time and a lot of them kept calling out "Miss Devlin! I didn't know you were leaving! I'm going to miss you!"

At the end of school, I was on duty outside the door so I got to say goodbye, sign yearbooks and take a few pictures. Elissa in the 5th grade gave me a rose. So cute. The first picture is me with my "little sister" in 4th grade, Angelica. My favorite student! The next one is Andrew from 5th, Duane from 2nd and Mya from 5th. Mya was my other favorite student. Yeah I had 2 favorites hahaha.

The last picture is of Christopher and Melissa, both from 3rd grade. Melissa was one of the better students in that class, and Christopher was one of the most difficult. He was entertaining, but also a pain most of the time. But it was definitely a learning experience trying to teach him! (He's Mya's brother).

So, anyway that was my last day at school with the kids. On Friday I went back to clean up my desk and reset the passwords on the computers. I thought I'd only be there for a few hours, but I ended up staying all day, helping out different teachers clean up their classrooms. Although it was a little tough, it was also really fun. We listened to music and took down posters, organized books, and labeled desks. I'm going to see the teachers one more time tomorrow when I go to the ACE training with them, so that's when I'll say my goodbyes!

This weekend was great too! We had visitors from 2 JV houses in LA. It was nice showing them around Tucson. Then, Meghan came on Saturday and we got to spend the whole day together! In the morning we went to Starbucks chatted and caught up. We then went to her family friends house. We hung out by their pool and had BBQ food. (veggie burgerrr) Then we all went over to the Tucson Padres baseball game. I had never been to a baseball game in the US (only in Japan, which is much cooler) but it was just minor league. We ended up talking and eating caramel corn, occasionally looking up like "oh they just got a home run!" haha. Good times tho! We got bored and left after the 6th inning. Then we went over to Meghan's friend's house with her sister and brother and played drinking games. I was the best cuz I was playing with water hahaha. I'm not drinking the week before the marathon.

Another thing hard to believe--in only 5 days I will be running 26.2 miles!!! ahhhhh

Overall, tho it's been a good week. I'm so glad I had the opportunity to work at Santa Cruz this year!

and runnin runnin....

The marathon is less than 2 weeks away! I've already run my longest run (17miles!) before the marathon and now it's just shorter runs and eating a lot (got that covered!)

Lately, I've been running with my housemates, which makes it a lot more fun! On my 17 mile run I ran the first 8 with Erin and Jen. And on Saturday, Jen ran 10 with me and Erin ran all 13.1 miles! (her first half marathon!!) This picture is from when we ran the VT run with the YAVs but still...look how happy we are while running! hehehe

Now on Thursday nights we've started to run as a whole community (Jeff too!) and it's been great. We are pretty crazy, dancing and singing in the streets, ya know....

I'm so happy that my training is almost complete! Especially since it's getting really HOT here! It's going to hit 100 degrees on Friday and I don't know if I'm quite prepared for that yet!!!

School is ending this Thursday so I get a 4 day weekend with Memorial Day, then I officially start working at the Food Bank! I'm going to be working with the Farmer's Markets on Tuesdays and Thursdays (and some Mondays). The rest of the days I'm going to volunteer at Casa Maria, the Catholic Worker community here in Tucson and/or I'll float around to volunteer other places as well. It'll be fun to have a more free schedule (as in not getting to work at 7:30am every M-F!)

Yesterday we went to Santa Cruz's (5th-8th grade) performance of Aladdin here at school. It was pretty good! There are definitely some kids that I will miss when school is over. (More so the little ones, but the play was still good!) I taught 7th grade for the last time today and I told them I won't be returning next year. One of the girls, Ajiah, asked me "Why? You don't like us or somethin?" haha. I was like "no...this is a one year commitment..." But yeah it's hard to explain to the kids why I am leaving so soon after just getting here this year! Luckily they will still have computer classes with the JV who is taking over my position next August!

It's actually kind of eerily quiet at school today since the Pre-K thru 4th graders are at their Pool Day. I guess they are much louder than the upper grades! But, it has been a good last Monday at school. Now only 2 and a half more days and school's out for the summer!

Going back to running...I'm actually taking a rest day today cuz I rode my bike to work.....that's cross training right? haha

Summer's almost here!

Only 1.5 more weeks of school! Ahhh!

The last official day of school is May 26th, but I'll be done teaching by the 25th because the last day is just a half day with an Awards Assembly and Mass. The 8th graders graduated on Friday, so I have already taught them for the last time! Our last class involved finishing up their webpages and sharing them with their classmates.

I taught the Pre-K for the last time today! (They will be having their "Pool Day" next Monday). I love them so much, they are adorable!! I had them each show me their computer skills by logging in, opening up Internet Explorer, scrolling down, clicking on a link and maximizing the page. They did so well, I'm proud of them :) I almost started laughing out loud when one of the little boys started singing Bruno Mars' Lazy Song! He was like "I said it, I said cuz I can..." So cute!!

I have been loving teaching lately. This afternoon I was helping out in the 2nd grade room planning trips for their social studies projects. One of the groups was going to Rocky Point, two groups were planning on Disneyland, one going to Oakland (to see the Raiders! duh!) and one group was going to Vegas. It was so fun planning these imaginary trips with the kids on a giant map! Then, randomly, one of the little girls comes up to me with her hands in the shape of a gate and says "open the gate" So I opened it and then she was like "pick some flowers, how many flowers did you pick" and I said "5" and then she goes "You have 5 boyfriends and they are all jealous!" hahaha

So anyway, after school ends next week I'm not really sure what I'm doing. I have been looking for volunteer opportunities in the area. Originally I was going to be tutoring in the summer, but that kind of fell through. Now, it looks like I will be (hopefully) working part time at the Food Bank where Jeff works and part of the time someplace else (who knows!) I kind of want to construct my own schedule so that I don't have to work on Fridays (how sweet would that be?!) It's pretty exciting:)
Another thing about summer coming is the weather! It's starting to get HOT~ and without A/C (it broke!) it kind of sucked last week being in the 90's. Luckily this week is cooling off to the 80's, but soon enough it will be back up and into the 100's. Scary...

A fun thing I have been doing lately is starting to cook more Mexican style meals. Last week I made sweet potato, black bean and cheese enchiladas.
My first enchilada cooking experience and it tasted great! I even threw things into them that weren't in the recipe! (I added peppers, onions, cilantro and cheese, used corn tortillas instead of flour and fresh tomatoes instead of canned)
I'm making a sort of similar thing tonight: Black bean and corn quesadillas with guacamole! woo!

So, yeah. Life is good here in Tucson. I'm going to miss the kids when school is over! (well...most of them;)This is a prickly pear cactus (my favorite!) with flowers on it!

Silence

We just got back from our silent retreat yesterday. It was amazing.

It was 3 full days of silence. I have never experienced anything like that in my life!

Our house, the two Phoenix houses and the San Diego house all went to the Redemptorist Renewal Center, which is actually a really cool place! It's 20 minutes north of our house in the desert, with beautiful views of cacti and mountains...ok we see that all the time, but it was still pretty! There was a pool and we each got our own room (which is great when you're not talking!) and the meals were provided (they even had Pad Thai one night!).

I think the weirdest part for me was not looking at people in the eyes. We were supposed to look away, and even though I felt like smiling and looking at people that I knew, I had to just look down and walk away. But besides that, it was great. I actually learned a lot about my spirituality these last few days.

As I told my casamates and my spiritual director (Fumi, an FJV): over the last few years I have felt disconnected with the Catholic church. There is a lot that I don't believe in and things that I wish were part of the church. I want women to be able to be priests, I think gay people should be able to get married, and I am pro-choice. I also have a difficult time believing and agreeing with a lot that is in the Bible. I guess this all started in college, but it's been getting on my nerves lately and because I felt so disconnected from the church, I was feeling disconnected with God. But, then the silent retreat started and that all changed.

Fumi asked me the first day what I desired from the retreat. I decided that I wanted to be reconnected with God and I was going to do that through new types of prayer. Mass just hasn't been my thing lately. (Especially mass at Santa Cruz...very conservative). So, Fumi gave me lots of different types of prayers over the three days, I tried centering prayer, memory prayer, imagination prayer, conversation with God, and an art examen. Outside of spiritual direction I also did the labyrinth, a peace vigil, journaling, the guided hand meditation, and a collage. I found that I really like the centering prayer and the meditation. When I had tried meditation before, (high school?) I was in a very different place in my life. Now I think I'm really ready to try centering prayer for 20 minutes a day! (Wikipedia link if you're wondering what centering prayer is!)

Another thing that really helped me during the silent retreat was reading a book called "Losing Your Religion, Finding Your Faith." It was all about how we tie our religion and faith together when we are younger, but when we start to question our religion, we also question our faith. It was really cool and helpful. It used the metaphor of a road trip saying we are all on our spiritual journeys and we don't have to have it all figured out right now!

I wrote down some quotes from it into my journal:

"We sometimes think that because we cannot pray as we used to, we have lost our faith. But this is not so. It is only that God is challenging us to grow to a new and different level of prayerful intimacy."

"It would be terrible if we woke up one day, realized that all religious truth is simply read in the Bible, and then decided that there was nothing more to learn in the realm of spirituality...God wants us to discover all the different colors, experiences, and nuances along the road of faith."

"When we do not set aside a regular time to be attuned to God's voice in our lives, it is all too easy to become permanently distracted, spiritually asleep."

I think I had been feeling spiritually asleep until this silent retreat. Now, however, I have decided that prayer is an important part of my life. I want to not only do the centering prayer every day, but I will also be trying some new forms of prayer in the next few weeks. It feels really good to be a little more spiritually awake after that retreat!