I like to think that, for the next four months (that’s right, one down already!) that I live in Yelm, WA I am an ambassador for the canby house. This doesn’t mean I wear suits, get rides in limos*, am offered bribes* or get diplomatic immunity*, but it does mean that I look for opportunities to tell people about sustainability, recycling, gardening, and how un-evil beer and secular music can be.
It has been a difficult month here. I’ve been put into the pressure cooker that is a commercial kitchen (with very little experience), I’ve been confronted with changing relationships with my friends in Portland, I’ve felt the loneliness of this sudden isolation, and I’ve borne these same burdens in the rest of the staff here.
The community here is something special. There is something powerful that happens when you spend nearly every waking moment with the same people – that process of familiarizing happens much faster. This small group of pre-camp staff already knows each other well enough to do everything so much more effectively, everything from annoying to uplifting, from tearing down to loving fiercely, and from getting each other laughing uncontrollably to spreading sickness**. The power in that vulnerability is sometimes scary.
One of the things that I have noticed here is that everyone thinks everyone else is their business. If I take a walk by myself after work, people want to know where I went, who I talked to on the phone, and what I thought about it. It is hard for an introvert like me to give over some of my last remaining shreds of privacy, but I do happily because to accept community is to give in to being known perhaps more fully than we’d like.
I’d love to see the Canby Community move more in the direction of asking those personal questions. Not questions that make people feel judged or excluded, but questions that show love, concern, and our desire to know and be known.
What do you think?
Bryce
* Dear Canby house residents, if any of these things ARE available to persons acting as an ambassador, said persons should be notified IMMEDIATELY.
** Dear Candice, I am STILL invincible.
Whew! Some powerful thoughts and ideas there. I agree that we accept community we have to be known better and that means asking and answering those personal questions, but boy oh boy do I struggle with that. I hesitate to ask the questions of others and quiver at answering them.
Thanks for sharing.
Diane
I like it a lot. Absurdly normal and yet strikingly radical. What is different about camp that makes it a more natural fabric for that sort of thing?
A couple things I would say make it a “more natural fabric”. First, the fact that people actually can’t avoid each other. It’s forced community (that everyone has chosen), and so you can’t help but develop a powerful community. There’s really not much else to do.
I think most people come to camp expecting to have this community too. They embrace it and work for it from the beginning. People are completely sold on the idea. And again, perhaps that is because there is nothing else to do here.