One of our first PLACE lessons was about defining your sense of place.
A definition describes "place" as "the specific portion of space normally occupied by anything".
My original thought was along the lines of "I'm a military brat, I've had tons of places that have meaning to me. The Moose River Bow Trip in Maine, the spooky tree in Ohio, a mountain overlooking my neighborhood in California and the creek down the road from my house in Alabama."
After six months with MCC, my outlook on a sense of place has changed.
It's more about a feeling of belonging in an area and the satisfaction I get making a difference there. It's the crew I'm surrounded by and the folks I encounter on a daily basis. It's the homesickness I feel in between hitches when I'm forced to return to civilization for food and clean clothes. It's being so in love that you want to breathe in everything around you so you can be a part of something so beautiful.
This is how I feel about the Shoshone National Forest. Riding my horse out every morning I know I have an amazing day ahead no matter how many rock slides we have to fix or streams to re-route. This is exactly where I'm supposed to be and I've never been so proud of the work I do.
wooooo.
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