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All my life I have longed to go home—to find a professional life that blended with my personal life in a seamless flow, to “come down where we ought to be”. Each year of living brings new glimpses of possibilities and with the compassionate and committed team of Empowerment Unlimited, I am delighted to share my life journey with others who are looking to connect around community and purpose-driven lives.
When I was a teenager, perhaps even earlier in grade school, I committed myself to a life of service and imagined myself as a Maryknoll nun running an orphanage in some far-flung spot in the world. I dreamed, from the time I was nine years old, of having ten children, all adopted from different countries. I dreamed of adventure and finding home around the globe, of becoming a writer and connecting with others. Though the specifics changed as I lived my life, in many ways I fulfilled those childhood intentions. After marrying in my early twenties, I traveled and sought out work in service to others, first through a year’s stint in the Peace Corps in Central America in the early 1980’s and later through non-profit work in other countries around the world. My husband’s work as a foreign service officer with the US Agency for International Development led us, for several years at a time, to Egypt, Nicaragua, Honduras, Washington, D.C., Guatemala, and Mozambique. We adopted three children from Latin America and their presence in my life has been, and is, a source of constant joy and learning. They have been guides to coming home to myself.
In each new country we visited, I tried to find my “place” in the community. I started a non-profit in Nicaragua in the early 1990’s to take books to children in schools and communities so they might fall in love with reading, taught literature in an overseas American school, worked with prisoners in a family literacy project in Washington, D.C., and supported mobile libraries in communities in Mozambique. I published a children’s book. I tutored children in math and reading. I trained and supervised teachers and started a library in an inner-city community education program in Guatemala City.
It was poetry, in the end, first through reading, then through writing, that brought me home—home to forgiveness and compassion toward myself and others. Galway Kinnell, Mary Oliver, Stanley Kunitz, Marie Howe, Sharon Olds, Rumi, and Hafiz and so many others were the first ones to introduce me, through their poems, to my own deep grief and longing. And with poetry came an acceptance of the unexplainable: though essentially alone, we are always in the company of others.
In the end, the inward journey toward home was just a beginning. I gave up living the life of an expat with a new home in a new country every few years and returned to the United States in September of 2011, to a rambling green cedar-sided home in a neighborhood on a hill at the edge of the woods near the Swannanoa River in the mountains of western North Carolina. You can see Craggy Mountain from the rocking chair by the window facing north. A mama bear and her three cubs visit several times in the spring. During the day, I leave my door unlocked, unheard of in the countries we lived in. My neighbors argue about road access and cutting trees for wider views. A friend calls me to hike the river trail and near the end we sit and observe the movement and play of water over rocks and wind and sunshine through clouds and trees. My adult children sit together around the table to eat meals together and play games, after years of not sharing a table.
I am learning to be patient, patient in a way I wasn’t when my longing for home was constrictive rather than expansive. Now, more often than not, I am full of wonder at the possibilities inherent in each moment and know more deeply than I have at any point in my life that this moment is all there is. That home is where we find ourselves. We can’t know what comes next. Things change. To be open and welcoming to whatever comes is grace.
I am continually surprised at the unexpected gifts of this inward and outward coming home. One of those gifts is working with Empowerment Unlimited. I am looking forward to being part of this team to work with others who are interested in moving toward home, that place we all know is “just right”, whether it be in their professional work, their personal lives, or where the two blend and overlap.
~ Mary Jo Amani
When I was a teenager, perhaps even earlier in grade school, I committed myself to a life of service and imagined myself as a Maryknoll nun running an orphanage in some far-flung spot in the world. I dreamed, from the time I was nine years old, of having ten children, all adopted from different countries. I dreamed of adventure and finding home around the globe, of becoming a writer and connecting with others. Though the specifics changed as I lived my life, in many ways I fulfilled those childhood intentions. After marrying in my early twenties, I traveled and sought out work in service to others, first through a year’s stint in the Peace Corps in Central America in the early 1980’s and later through non-profit work in other countries around the world. My husband’s work as a foreign service officer with the US Agency for International Development led us, for several years at a time, to Egypt, Nicaragua, Honduras, Washington, D.C., Guatemala, and Mozambique. We adopted three children from Latin America and their presence in my life has been, and is, a source of constant joy and learning. They have been guides to coming home to myself.
In each new country we visited, I tried to find my “place” in the community. I started a non-profit in Nicaragua in the early 1990’s to take books to children in schools and communities so they might fall in love with reading, taught literature in an overseas American school, worked with prisoners in a family literacy project in Washington, D.C., and supported mobile libraries in communities in Mozambique. I published a children’s book. I tutored children in math and reading. I trained and supervised teachers and started a library in an inner-city community education program in Guatemala City.
It was poetry, in the end, first through reading, then through writing, that brought me home—home to forgiveness and compassion toward myself and others. Galway Kinnell, Mary Oliver, Stanley Kunitz, Marie Howe, Sharon Olds, Rumi, and Hafiz and so many others were the first ones to introduce me, through their poems, to my own deep grief and longing. And with poetry came an acceptance of the unexplainable: though essentially alone, we are always in the company of others.
In the end, the inward journey toward home was just a beginning. I gave up living the life of an expat with a new home in a new country every few years and returned to the United States in September of 2011, to a rambling green cedar-sided home in a neighborhood on a hill at the edge of the woods near the Swannanoa River in the mountains of western North Carolina. You can see Craggy Mountain from the rocking chair by the window facing north. A mama bear and her three cubs visit several times in the spring. During the day, I leave my door unlocked, unheard of in the countries we lived in. My neighbors argue about road access and cutting trees for wider views. A friend calls me to hike the river trail and near the end we sit and observe the movement and play of water over rocks and wind and sunshine through clouds and trees. My adult children sit together around the table to eat meals together and play games, after years of not sharing a table.
I am learning to be patient, patient in a way I wasn’t when my longing for home was constrictive rather than expansive. Now, more often than not, I am full of wonder at the possibilities inherent in each moment and know more deeply than I have at any point in my life that this moment is all there is. That home is where we find ourselves. We can’t know what comes next. Things change. To be open and welcoming to whatever comes is grace.
I am continually surprised at the unexpected gifts of this inward and outward coming home. One of those gifts is working with Empowerment Unlimited. I am looking forward to being part of this team to work with others who are interested in moving toward home, that place we all know is “just right”, whether it be in their professional work, their personal lives, or where the two blend and overlap.
~ Mary Jo Amani
