Last night I slept in the field again, something I have been doing every night this year. I love how many stars you can see when it’s clear out (including sometimes meteors!) and the pretty cloud patterns on other nights. In the morning I headed straight to the kitchen to chop vegetables and serve breakfast. Afterwards I dropped my laundry off at Forest Dell, and went to morning meeting where we sang the special Laundry Day song written by a past camper.
Our Culminator Kyras led my Advisee group today, since our Advisor was busy with his other job. It was her last day so she led a circle where she shared appreciations for all of us, and at the end we did the same for her. It was really nice, but I do wish we could have completed one of her schemes before she left.
After Advisee I attended a workshop by Reanna about periods, which was really interesting and I feel I learned a lot.
Then at lunch we had our second Trust Circle committee meeting to discuss the evening flow and who would be leading each section.
In the afternoon I attempted the climbing tree again, but didn’t make it that much farther than I did yesterday. I plan to keep trying every day until the end of camp to see how high I can get. The climbing tree is really tall and has lovely huge branches so it’s awesome to climb but kind of scary for me, and really hard to get up into. I also walked down to pebble beach and sat talking with Carmen for a while, before going to the field to work on my band weaving project. I then went back to my tent to start cabin cleanup early.
While I was cleaning up my tent I found two more poison oak plants (by walking through them, of course) so I had had to wash my feet and Grace helped me move my entire tent to a place that was sunnier but significantly safer from poison oak. She also took my stuff that had gotten into it to wash and return to me later. This is really great because it means that I will be able to go to my tent at night and keep track of my stuff easier, and I won’t have to be quite so cautious around my tent area.
The second part of cabin cleanup is a competition between cabins to have the best decorations based on a theme, which Tent Village competed in for the first time in a while. I was busy relocating, but they flipped a tent upside-down to represent an alien spaceship crash landing, strung fairy lights everywhere, and used ropes to lift another tent 10 feet in the air.
The evening event for today was Trust Circle. Unfortunately though, just as the committee was about to set up the space, the power went out. This was a big problem because the whole idea of Trust Circle requires seeing who is stepping into the circle in answer to the questions.
We ended up gathering many lanterns and strings of fairy lights to put in the middle of the room, and Trust Circle went really well. I heard a lot of campers talking about how much they loved the questions we had changed for this year. And after that we hung out in the quiet lodge for a while and ate snack before I went to bed early (and in the field again).
Chaya M, Camper