A Reflection on Missed Camp Experiences
My siblings and I didn’t have the summer camp experience, that potentially transformative break from regular time and space, interacting and bonding with kids of similar or different backgrounds. And, for those who keep returning, familiar “home away from home,” turf on which to enact/embody personal identity and agency building, shift from parent to peer influences. Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, et al. started lifelong friend and professional relationships and laid the groundwork for great careers while they honed musical, writing and performance skills staging camp skits and plays. (PBS documentary Broadway Musicals: A Jewish Legacy. 2013). Judy Heumann, godmother of the disabled rights movement, incubated from 10 years at a camp where she and other kids previously sidelined into special education classes (their wheelchairs and crutches called “fire hazards”!) were empowered to push physical limits and resist parents’ and society’s control and “protection.” (Netflix documentary Crip Camp. 2020; Wikipedia). This eventually led to the Americans with Disabilities Act
Seeking Roots in Unfamiliar Places
We, my brother, two sisters and I, visited different places but not the same ones. And we traveled mostly together with our mother. Only weak connections to a home base, our other constants were the car we crammed ourselves into (an old light blue Ford for most of our travels) and baseball, wherever my dad was managing that season’s team. We’d drop into a succession of small communities for a couple months, become locally and momentarily “famous,” then we’d depart, leaving no trace behind, as if we’d never even been there. Who was that masked rider? In retrospect, it feels like a Zeno’s Paradox progression through a series of random locations, but somehow never getting anywhere. My brother could be batboy and go on team road trips, but baseball had no place for my sisters and me, just along for the ride. I talk of my childhood self now as being like a baby anthropologist, but unlike those “professional strangers,” I became a non-participant observer, stuck in the back seat, staring out the car window, daydreaming, making up stories about the passing scene.
Travel and Disconnecting
Note that summer camp wasn’t sunny fun for all who did go. Comedian Sarah Silverman has described surviving hers as a chronic bedwetter, sheets sopping wet, yet her parents kept sending her back. They both had fond camp memories and she thought they appreciated the summer break. So, we follow grownups’ path until we’re able to veer off on our own. The basic fact of my family’s life was that baseball was my dad’s true religion. Recognize a variation on a common theme: Swiss Family Robinson and Little House on the Prairie trope of restless, seeking, dads who drag their progeny out into the wilderness/frontier/ocean. Though that was probably more my mother. Single parent half the year, a total non-athlete, I suspect she felt she deserved a little excitement, if only as a spectator. Certainly never, if you knew her, a cheerleader. And she needed us around her as a security blanket. She’d write out our routes, but still worried we’d missed the turns. This even though we learned to watch for route signs as soon as we could read and recognize numbers.
Rediscovering the Body
Not surprising that I still tend to view life as an extended road trip, internal and external. Sometimes a tedious schlep, but now and then it’ll throw us surprises, around the bend, on the other side of a hill. So, not entirely unexpected that, a couple months back, I happened on a chance to sample an abbreviated version of the camp experience I’d missed earlier in life. Only figured that out after I arrived. But who says you can’t go back? Fittingly called circle dance, in fact “Sacred Circle Dance,” the festival/camp in Mexico was in its 29th year. Proved to be a wonderful, expansive, bi-lingual (Spanish and English) experience. Around 100 of us, almost all women, with a slight sprinkling of men. And many already knew each other, had danced together, some for 20 or 30 years. People kept asking how I got there. I had the same question and kept thinking of Bob Dylan’s My Back Pages. “Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.”
The Journey to Sacred Circle Dance
At the camp, a “rookie” (baseball references don’t quit), I felt/knew I had “two left feet.” But veterans shared the motto, “If you can walk, you can dance.” So, all right. I could do that. Not a natural, but fellow “campers” made me welcome, gave me advice on whose feet to watch. Not across the circle; they’re on the opposite foot. It was such fun and powerful, and magical. I’m told that in time I won’t need to watch; I’ll have it in my body. When people asked, I gave them the short version of my story: reconnecting with my body; my mom and dad and baseball; taking Tai Chi with the sense of internal energy; reading an article by Laura Sullivan, one of the “godmothers”; searching on google. They praised my courage for coming on my own and without previous experience. And for joining the circle, not hesitating, holding back. Striving to pick up basic dance steps. “You’re an inspiration.” A woman told me. And I replied, “If you pay your money, might as well take your chances.”
Overcoming Self-Doubt
Meanwhile, I reflected on my longer journey and two early memories. In the first, bored and barely in my body, I sit in front of looming nuns. All about keeping us in our seats, they taught by rote, had us memorize everything from catechism answers to science definitions. In the second memory, I run, released and exuberant in my body and little cowgirl outfit, down the back walk at home. In the moment for once, I feel rooted and I’m all joyous physicality. My younger self struggled to find balance, to tease out clues on how to be a girl, become a woman. And the only models available were my not very active mother and the disembodied nuns, shrouded in black and white and celibate too. Baffled, I took a detour, downplayed my body and feeling parts, lived mostly in my head—reading, storytelling, writing. Yet I always felt the gap. And, like Peter Pan looking for his lost shadow, I wanted them back. Along the way, I recalled that I had another active genetic legacy from my dad. And I started discovering resources—Yoga, Tai Chi, etc.—to merge body, spirit, soul. Wish I’d had them before. But how could I? Certainly, nothing the nuns or their “superiors” would have sanctioned. It took the pendulum swing of the ecstatic, romantic, overreaching 1960s to bring us these treasures from the east. Not that everyone would agree, but I view them as true gifts of the Magi. Isn’t life all metaphor?
Challenging Cartesian Dualism
Still me, I’d brought a book to “camp,” David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous. (Vintage. C1996, 2017). Little time to read, but I shared the message. Rejection of any “lingering assumption of a self-subsistent, disembodied, transcendental ego” a la Descartes. His brain-centered ideas have taken a beating in recent years. And why not? The most brilliant minds can concoct silly ideas that lead the whole culture down dead ends, like treating the body as a mere vestigial organ to carry the head around. But “…If without this body there would be no possibility of experience—then the body itself is the true subject of experience…identifying the subject—the experiencing ‘self’—with the bodily organism.”
Protection and Community
The final, chilly, morning, about to board the bus for the Mexico City airport, I was asked to pick from a deck of angel cards. Mine read (in Spanish) Generosidad Y Apertura (Generosity and Openness). At home, I put the card on my bookcase and found myself raised up, courage and sense of the world and possibilities expanded. Easy enough to do one-off bravery, in a place outside regular time, under a temporary enchanted spell. But can/could I carry through in everyday life? When the mundane starts to impinge? Not to lose momentum, first night back, I pulled my weary mind-body together and attended a local Jung Society talk on “Trauma and the Transcendent Function.” Not “out there,” but “in here.” Find meaning in affectively calibrated self-narrative, meaning and Identity Creation. Story about who I am. I felt the synchronicity.
Finding Guidance in Unexpected Places
Next day, I continued ongoing conversation with my Tai Chi teacher. We’ve talked about trying circle dance there when I’m ready. More synchronicity: seems I’ve established a degree of bona fides just sticking around, staying in the moment and in my body. And since no one else seems to be doing Circle Dance here (as far as I can tell), perhaps I might start? Can I muster the courage to step out? Will there be a market? Scouting out other dance resources, I’ve found a local “International Dance” group. Another sub-culture of folks who’ve danced together for years. Not quite the same, but close enough for now. Such fun and the chance to hone skills with another group of lovely and welcoming people.
Bridging the Gap
Later, I read June Watts (Circle Dance: Celebrating the Sacred in Dance. Green Magic. 2006), another of the godmothers. I resonate with her words on her own first experience. “It all fell into place, as things do when you’re on track in your life…The universe always demonstrates support when you take a step clearly and strongly in answer to the soul’s prompting….” So, “We just show up, hold hands, and off we go…great joy that it is so accessible.” The Sacred part, “works on the whole person—all levels—clearing the emotions, calming the mind, strengthening the presence of the spirit in the body.” And a fellow camper, Diane Pienta, sent me her book Be the Magic (Citrine Publishing. C2023). “…[T]he world never stops sending us guidance, nudges, bricks-over-the-head towards what our hearts are longing for, for what would bring us the most joy. If we could just remove the blinders from our eyes, we could attune to the guidance and the beauty…we could see the magic.” Amen.
Stepping into New Spaces
And so, I commit myself to continue this road trip. To keep on keeping on. And I find I have plenty of company, other folks on their own paths to embody. Probably mixing metaphors, but I can also view the path as a stream. The pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus said you can’t step into the same stream twice. I had gone away to “camp” and come back changed and my route has changed too and keeps expanding. And if I trust that the way will open ahead of me, there can be no wrong turns.