Greetings from Hilltop. What a week it has been at Camp. I’ll get to it all, but first I want to talk about Sunday. Sundays are days for slowing down, reflection, service, and celebration at Camp. While we’re not a religious camp, we do borrow this good idea from religious traditions across the world that taking time out of the normal routine for those things is important. On Sundays, we sleep in for an hour, have a nice breakfast, and then have Sunday Assembly (more on that in a minute). After Sunday Assembly, we have work projects, because we know it’s important for kids to contribute to this community as well a receive from it. We then have lunch, an extra long rest hour, and then a fun Sunday afternoon activity. Today, it will be Regatta Day, and the whole camp will spend the afternoon down on the dock. The weather is beautiful, and it will be a great day for it. After dinner on Sundays, we have our oldest evening activity, Evening Fire. We’ll gather in the Lodge as campers and staff have for four generations to share music and poetry. It’s often when our feelings of community are at their strongest, and I can’t wait.
There’s a quirk of Four Winds, which is that our calendar doesn’t have the campers arriving on the same day of the week every session, so each time we make up the calendar, it’s a different amount of time from the first day of Camp to the first real Sunday, as we’d say in Camp parlance. It’s necessary to say real Sunday because of course arrival day was a Sunday. For a Sunday to be real, we need to follow the schedule I’ve outlined above, and arrival day doesn’t. This session, because of the Sunday arrival, we had the maximum amount of time between the campers’ arrival and a real Sunday. Each calendar has pros and cons, but this one been fun to see. That full week before the first Sunday makes it so camp no longer feels like it’s in the beginning of camp. All the campers’ schedules are set, everyone knows where everything is, everyone knows the routines, and cabin dynamics have formed. This feels like a wonderful community, and so when we reflect on it and celebrate it today, we really know what we’re talking about.
I promised more information on Sunday Assembly. At each Sunday Assembly, a group of campers picks a topic that’s important at Camp, and talks about it in front of the whole group. Then, other campers have an opportunity to stand up and share their thoughts. Today, Flying Cloud and Crow’s Nest spoke about leadership. It’s a topic I think about a lot, because it’s really one of the things that makes Camp work on a fundamental level. True leadership is occurring when people are following a leader because they want to, not because they have to. The latter isn’t leadership, it’s control. True leadership isn’t tied to a certain personality type, or a title. It’s about service, and ideas that make a community better. Flying Cloud, Crow’s Nest, and many campers spoke eloquently about that at Sunday Assembly, and their understanding of leadership explains a lot of why this community feels as strong as it does, and it gives me great hope for what these campers will create over the next three weeks.
I usually recap the week in these posts, so here we go: I already told you about the first two night’s evening activities, Nesting and Biffer Medic. We had Cabin Adventure on Tuesday night, in which each cabin comes up with its own fun activity. On Wednesday, we had Sports Night, which is just as it sounds. On Thursday, we had Moonraker, which is silly songs and skits on Moonraker Point, one of the most beautiful spots in Camp, on the northern end of the property. On Friday, we had a Folk Dance, one of our most well loved evening activities, in which we dress up in crazy costumes and dance to line dances (my favorite is the Pata Pata, followed by the Virginia Reel). Last Night, we had Age Group Night, and each of the six groups came up with their own thing to do. I took a walk around camp, and it was impressive to see all the groups so engaged and having fun. Tonight, as I mentioned, we’ll have Evening Fire.
These campers have done a wonderful job of getting our Second Session community started off right. They’ve been open to trying new things, they’ve been inclusive and welcoming to each other, and they’ve had a ball. We’re off to a great start. Until next week…