How The Spiral of Trauma Turns To Healing
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Hello you, Courage Words for the week to come: collective trauma, collective healing. ** Come with me, courageous one, I promise it'll come around in a good way. ** Did you ever go to camp as a child? How was it? Or, how was/is the absence of that experience in your life? I did not go to camp when I was a kid. We didn’t really have many ‘kids' camps’ in Alberta when I was growing up, at least not that I knew about. I went out into the bush sometimes with my dad and siblings (sometimes sublime, or fraught, or both, and sometimes a too-bear-filled experience) and my mom sometimes took us to Banff National Park. (Minnewanka was a word I loved as a child; it still echoes talismanic in my ear, Lake Minnewanka, Minnewanka, Minnewanka, a green-blue vault of beauty. In Nakoda it means ‘water of the spirits’). But ‘going to camp’ was not a thing in my young life. In Ontario, the kids’ camp are often beloved institutions. Some families send multiple kids, even multiple generations to certain camps in the Ontario woods, to learn to canoe and hike and swim, to eat and play together, to sing songs around the campfire. Dot-dot-dot . . . So, making up for some childhood no-shows, in mid-September, for the first time ever, I went to CAMP. This was partly to experience a digital detox retreat, because that will be a feature of the retreat I’m hosting on the island of Lesvos. (Thank you to those who filled out my Glorious Greek Retreat Survey! I would still LOVE to hear from you–even if you’re only mildly interested in joining us, either in the spring or the fall. . . . . Here is the link. It has a few pics so you get a feel for the place. YES, please forward this newsletter to friends who might want to join us. ) The camp I recently attended was for adults. It took place at Camp Walden, a venerable and much beloved kids’ camp in the Ontario woods, not far from Bancroft. Camp Reset is a yearly camp experience, co-created by the loving, generous Reset Collective, an organization that also runs a co-working space in Little Jamaica, Toronto, dedicated (like the camp) to social health and inclusion. They also like dancing to good music while the moon rises . . . Naturally I had to go! I knew no one (except the folks I’d met briefly at the Reset Living Room in Toronto, the co-work space). What I was expecting, going to camp with 200 other adults in the woods? I have no f** idea! Trying not to have too many expectations, I carried with me the simple intention to have fun. To play. To be received. And Camp Reset was incredible. It was A Portal. When we leave home, we often go through that Portal. That’s what Leaving Home is for. Many of us have explored other cities, provinces, countries, cultures, languages, identities. Going away from home in search of (or in flight from) transformation is one of our oldest and most important human stories, the source of beautiful, frightening, illuminating myths and legends. Each of us have our personal tales about Leaving Home and Going Through The Portal. What is your most important one? And how do you honour that passage now? Undoubtedly my most important portal was my first sojourn abroad, as an exchange student in Thailand at seventeen. It changed my life in ways that continue to resonate in my life. Inviting people to meet me in the Olive Grove is directly linked to the experiences I had all those years ago—1986/87 in Denchai, Thailand. The book I wrote about that experience changed my life again in my early twenties. It unexpectedly became a bestseller and won a major literary award, which enabled me to buy this tiny Greek house and the Olive Grove that surrounds it. So, the spiral turns, and turns . . . I hope to offer a similar experience to others . . . Yet every transformational experience, even a joyful one, can be hard. The confrontation with change, with new and old truths, can be disorienting. I KNOW this. But I forgot all about it. I wasn’t expecting Camp to be a portal. I thought playing in the woods would be easy. But I was triggered by a detail I could never have imagined before the trip. (Taaa-daaaa! Proof that the Portal still works.) Year after year, the children and teenagers who visit Camp Walden write their names on the rough cabin walls. Many names. I read them while I was lying in my bottom bunk, muttered at them while I was in the wash/bath room, nodded at them when I idly glanced at the ceiling, the walls, even the floor. Joking, profane, usually just the names, the names, the names, scrawled in black or red or purple Jiffy permanent marker. These kids had been to camp and literally marked their passage with their names, often scribbling down the year(s) too. How could I have known how these names would take me back to a time in my life when I learned and spoke and committed to memory the names of other girls, other women, some of whom had lived close to me on the Vancouver East Side? For many years, Say her name has been the rallying cry of Indigenous groups across Turtle Island. It's an exhortation that we speak aloud the names (of thousands) of Indigenous women and girls who’ve been murdered or gone missing in the last 30 years. (And for much longer, too.) I didn’t expect to be so triggered. To feel so much. The campers’ names sideswiped me. Dammit! Whatever my roles have been—writer, teacher, editor, therapist, little human witness in this big world—within them, I’ve often practiced holding, abiding with & attending to those who are in the midst of healing trauma. To remember, to name, to begin to speak the truth is to step through that other universal portal, of returning home to heal personal, generational and cultural wounds. As you know, the triggers and associations may seem to come out of nowhere — even for those of us who have, as they say, “done the work” of learning about and facing painful family and cultural realities. Yet they do not come out of nowhere: they are woven into our bodies and collective memories. That's why they echo on, still reaching out for us. My encounter with the names at Camp Reset was an experience of once again facing collective trauma (and personal trauma, too.) My grief and sadness, like a web, extended to the thousands of other innocent people murdered in Gaza, in the West Bank. In Yemen. In Sudan. And now, in Lebanon. In Canada, this coming Monday is the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, a time to honour the Indigenous people in Canada who experienced the cultural genocide of residential schools, a practice that continues through the foster system and incarceration. (In the US, in many states, the second Monday of October is Indigenous Peoples’ Day.) May we have the courage to hold presence for these days of honour and cultural memory. To enact decolonization at the political level and in our hearts and minds. While I was indeed sideswiped at Camp, I’d met people—a cabin mate, a woman at lunch on the last day, someone I caught a ride home with– who attended me, tended to me. People who listened, held space, witnessed the intensity of my surprise, my reaction. They received me. I’m grateful for that, to those individuals, and to Camp Reset. When we are taken by those pained or chaotic states of emotion, how does it feel to be received? Witnessed? Allow yourself to remember. To imagine. To feel the spiral turn again. Bon courage, kaz (P.S. Over the weekend, if you have a drop of curiosity, please find a few minutes to fill out my Olive Grove Survey. Super grateful for your help as I build this new Portal! It just takes a few minutes.) |