Hello! My name is bri, and I am in my 2nd year of AmeriCorps service. Last year I served as a VISTA at the Great Falls LGBTQ Center, and this year I serve at SpectrUM Discovery Area. This winter, the glorious season of seasons, I have spent my time creating science kits for students, sweating in a hot yoga studio, and seeking the scent of evergreen trees. Having grown up a Great Lakes Midwesterner, I have always found solace in the dark, snow covered months, but as for Montana “the next passage in my journey is a love affair…”

My yoga teacher has been reciting Nisargadatta Maharaj’s quote often this winter: “Love says ‘I am Everything’. Wisdom says ‘I am Nothing’. Between the two, my life flows.”

This cold, quiet season of death and rest accentuates Wisdom’s insight. Facetime holidays, my body’s plea to find stillness, and the lack of activity at the Missoula Public Library make my nothingness so palpable, my chest aches. The blue grey mountains, frozen deer silently passed on a hike, and exhausted savasanas make my nothingness so palpable, my heart sings. In service, the reality of my nothingness has at times been painful – it is painful that desired changes may not happen during a term of service. It is hard work to find my own gaps in knowledge, my own pockets of emptiness and reckon with them. This profound nothingness, though, has served me. It reminds me that I am a visitor to my community with an obligation to listen and to be willing. It demands that I reflect on my white ancestry and tread lightly on this stolen land. It allows me to bow humbly and with gratitude that indeed to dust I will return.

This bright, warm season of connection and selflessness resounds Love’s insistence. The muscles in my back calling out to me after days of making science kits, breath so synchronized I swear the walls are inhaling too, and kids’ blunt questions about brain specimens make my everythingness so palpable, my cheeks hurt. Fractal waves of ponderosas, the persistent tap of a pileated woodpecker, and Connie Converse’s lyric “you may think you left me all alone // but I can hear you talk without a telephone” make my everythingness so palpable, my heart sings. When the reality of everythingness graces me, I will my diaphragm to contract so that I might soak it all the way into my cells. Everything moments of joy and mishap and success in service float me from the rooted melancholic nothing – cozy lil fires to warm my worn wool socks. Between the two, my life flows.

bri creating at home science video called rainbow rain

bri n fern cutting down winter holiday tree