Picture a Spot: Capturing the Essence of Summer Camp

Go to a place in your mind that makes your heart soar. Find the memory in your bank, that brings calm to your restlessness. Imagine the place where when you arrive, you notice you also exhale.

For so many of us who grew up going to summer camps, this is that place. That unique location where kids were kids. No worries of societal pressures. No fighting with your siblings over the bathroom sink or your parent’s attention. No talks of politics and divide. Doing activities like swimming or archery, canoeing or horseback riding, painting in workshop or learning how to spot a poisonous bush or venomous snake. Catching fish or tubing through rapids. Giant games of red rover or touch. Singing songs about the beauty of the landscape, or the love of ice cream. Joining groups, teams or tribes, chanting war cries, battling it out in races or singing competitions. Acting out in skits or wearing matching scarves to show your loyalty. But no team, tribes or competitions divide friendships or separate one from another. They ignite comradery and solidarity. They provide space for honesty and humility, growth and lessons. They lend opportunity for creativity and problem solving skills.

The place, the land, it’s where you cannot only whisper into the belly of the Milky Way your hopes and your dreams, but you can picture them too. You eat s’mores by fire and tell ghost stories by flashlight. You hold hands with your best friends and hug your new ones. Siblings become friends, tears become invitations to share and memories remain fervent in the soul. You can’t wait to be in the older cabins and then long to be a camper again one day after you leave.

The camps, the places that kids go to let go of the worry, and live in the joy…it becomes imbedded into them. They aren’t just living their best lives, they are finding it.

As the song goes from my camp, “Picture a spot, so beauty rare…” and know that when campers, current or former, do, they picture the hills, the waterfronts, the laughter, the bunkbeds, the silly songs, the friendships…and themselves, in the purist of rare beauty there is.

So onto the Milky Way those precious lives started and where they traveled, our hearts will see them, our hope will envelop them and our prayers are with them.

#kerrunited