After being away for 10 years, i went to the gnarly rooted beginnings of my faith journey and spent a weekend at CROW Camp on Crowsnest lake Alberta. A highly packed event it was. Those in attendence (some 400!!) were there to celebrate 50 years of Camp being in existence. I discovered that there was much to be pondered from my ten summers at Crow (87-97) and my non crow summers (97-07). here they are...
Mainly, I just about fell apart, actually.
dont get me wrong. I do not have a hard time supporting camp and enjoying the wealth of memories and the fortitude it has brought on my person, but I guess 10 years do change a person. And Camp too. All for good, is my thinking.
In those 10 years, I moved to my now more or less settled "home".
I went from "single" to "engaged" to "married" to "infertile" to "mother of two".
I have gone from being a person highly stimulated by others and their energy and passions seeped into becoming my own:to developing a more clear idea of who I am- without a group of people-without husband, without children, without a hard and fast plan for the future career.
me at 26 is quite different than me at 36. where I once thrived on boundless activity and highly stimulating conversation, I now somehow seek out a more quiet way, still very relational just not as charged. It's not better or wiser, its just different. And the fact that everyone at camp that knew me from the past related to me in the way I formerly was, found me completely exhausted and insecure. Crappy. I felt utterly lost...which was totally weird in such a familiar setting.
it was a little bit of a hard reality to swallow, to be honest.
camp being the one place that felt like a true home to me, has grown into a place i used to love and a place i still cherish, but is not mine anymore.
It was sad. it was good. It was emotional. Holy Crap. i didnt know what hit me, but everytime I turned around I was trying to wipe a way a tear. And every other time I turned around the other way i wanted to hop back in the solitude of my own car with my two unruly chilluns and head home. listen to cbc. have a coffee and some black licorice.
However there were far too many good people to be with and enjoy the company of. The highlight being an hour or so (after all the kids were in bed) of an impromptu circle gathering of old friends, a bag of doritos, a handful of chairs dragged out of their lairs, and laughs about the times gone by.
And so the days pass. Days, months years, decades even,
God help us if we dont change.
God help us anyways.
