night revelations

Sometimes the world seems so much more manageable in the daylight.  Then at night my thoughts come undone and I can't remember which way is up.  This happened to me on Thursday night, when I realized I only have one more week at camp.  Which is one more week at the place that makes me happier than anywhere else in the world.  I know I will be happy after that too, but right now being in the real world sounds so awful to me.  So my thoughts kept spinning in circles in the middle of the night, forcing me to ask myself a lot of questions.

Like these:  Why am I happier here than in the "real world"?

What is it about life at camp that completes me?

How can I make it overlap more with my life at school?

And what do I do if it doesn't?

I don't have a lot of answers, but I do have a few revelations.  Like this one:

Life at camp is simple.  It's not easy; it's full of challenges, but it's simple.  All you have to do is love God, love the kids, and love the other staff.  And really, that's what I want to do in life:  love God and love the people around me, to the fullest extent I can. 

Here's another one:

I don't know exactly how the different parts of my life fit together, but I'm becoming oddly comforted by the phrase "It is what it is".  And I know that everything will be okay.  I believe in myself enough to follow what feels right to me, and being at camp teaches me a lot about what feels right.

reteaching beauty

The bud

stands for all things,

even for those things that don't flower,

for everything that flowers, from within, of self-blessing;

though sometimes it is necessary

to reteach a thing its loveliness,

to put a hand on its brow

of the flower

and retell it in words and in touch

it is lovely

until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;

as Saint Francis

put his hand on the creased forehead

of the sow, and told her in words and in touch

blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow

began remembering all down her thick length,

from the earthen snout all the way

through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,

from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine

down through the great broken heart

to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering

from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them:

the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

-Galway Kinnell

honesty and animal products

I realized this week that I am becoming the kind of vegetarian that I used to look upon scornfully.  By this, I mean that I have eaten pizza with bacon on it and lasagna with meat in it just in this week alone.  Contrary to what you might think, this is not to say that I'm forgetting or ignoring or giving up on my beliefs.  It just means that I'm becoming more relaxed about things.  I've come to understand very deeply the reasons why I choose not to eat meat, and with that understanding comes the acceptance that there will be times when it is okay to make exceptions.  I think in life it's best to be adamantly sure about some things and easygoing about others -- otherwise you just end up with a bunch of halfway ideas.

Anne Lamott is amazing, and you know why?  It's because she writes so honestly and freely about her own struggles and shortcomings.  Unlike the other 99 percent of the human race, she doesn't pretend to have it all together.  And she's not like those people who acknowledge that we have problems but don't really like to go into detail, either.  Most of her writing revolves around the times when she has to work hard to be okay, and she tells her stories with humor and also with reverence for what is beautiful and true.
This is one of my favorite parts from Grace (eventually), which I finished this week, and it kind of sums up the way I feel about working with kids.

Children can connect you to the child inside you, who can still play and be silly and helpless and capable of wonder.  This child does not have to be yours, of course.  It can be a niece or nephew, or the child of a friend.  But living with a child makes the opportunity for this more likely.  Having a child, loving a child deeply in a daily way, forces you to connect with your mortality, forces you to dig into places within that you have rarely had to confront before, unless you have taken care of a dying parent or friend.  What I found way down deep by caring for my father during his illness and then by having a child is a kind of eternity, a capacity for -- and reserves of -- love and sacrifice that blew my mind.  But I also found the stuff inside me that is pretty miserable.  I was brought face-to-face with a fun-house mirror of all the grasping, cowardly, manipulative, greedy parts of me, too.  
I remember staring at my son endlessly when he was an infant, stunned by his very existence, wondering where on earth he had come from.  Now when I watch him sleep, I know that he somehow came from life, only I cannot put it into words any better than that.

dependence

I've never had to enter a week of camp with questionable health before.  This week, by the time the kids came, I wasn't as sick as I was last week, but I still had a bad cough/cold...which I expected to get better quickly.  Except then it didn't.  And at night, I couldn't sleep because of coughing so much, which didn't do a whole lot to help my energy levels.  So I was concerned, because I wanted so much to do everything I could for my kids, and yet I knew for sure that my own strength was quickly fading.
Every morning, when I woke up feeling like I hadn't slept at all, after spending hours of the night coughing, I couldn't do anything but ask God to be my strength.  Psalm 55:22 says, "Cast your burden on the Lord, and he will sustain you; he will never allow the righteous to be shaken."  And this week taught me that this is true.  How else is it possible that I had more than enough energy to keep up with a cabin of seven- and eight-year-olds?

I also came to realize the way being around kids at camp energizes me.  Some would say it's exhausting to be responsible for a group of children (and spend most of your time surrounded by many more) for a week, and in a way, it is.  But I also know that their excitement and joy for life becomes my own.  Being surrounded by them, by their playfulness and hilarity and all-encompassing love, is more of a blessing than anyone who hasn't experienced it can understand.

So, all in all, I am thankful for the chance to believe in a strength that is greater -- and I'm ready for whatever challenge comes next.