Hello everyone!
Welcome to the first official summer 2008 blog entry! I imagine this is the first time here for a lot of you, so I want to encourage you to take a look around. You’ll find a few useful pages over on the left side there, one telling a bit about FC, one talking a little about me– the director– and then two pages of lodge photos from last year.
To see new photos from this summer, please log in to the “families only” section of the website. If you haven’t received a password for that yet and you think you should have, please get in touch with Becka Warren, our Communications Director at Becka@farmandwilderness.org.
As always, week one has been a whirlwind. While it’s always hard to explain why Flying Cloud is so special, this week there is one event that stands out.
Throughout our existence as a camp, ceremony and ritual have been important parts of Flying Cloud. Over the last few years we have been carefully examining many of our practices in order to make sure they align with our FC Core Values and that they fulfill the goals of deepening our relationship with nature and our community, improving our understanding of ourselves and illuminating the Quaker values we live by.
This summer, we had a beautiful morning of ceremony as a group. After breakfast we were called to the Naming Circle by the beating of the camp drum where we all sat in a circle around a small fire. After a few minutes, we each went off into the forest to gather a load of wood and sit in silent reflection. When the drum echoed again, we returned and stood together in a circle. One by one the members of our community stepped forward into the circle, carrying the wood they had collected. As they stood before the group, they spoke to the fire. We each took the time to either ask for some sort of support we needed, or to release any fears or pain we may have been carrying into the summer. After speaking, each man placed his bundle on the fire and walked around the circle back to where he had been standing. As he sat down, the next man stood and did the same. After a few minutes the tiny fire we had begun with was burning brightly and dancing tall.
When every member of FC had spoken, we all stood and together we sang the song we use to close every important ceremony at FC: “Brothers now our meeting is over….”
So began the summer of 2008.