Abracadabra… I create as I speak
Words create worlds - Abraham Joshua Heschel …
The foundation of my reality is rooted in the stories that I tell about myself, about my life. But sometimes I can't find the words and then reality sputters… when I don't know what to say, when I don't know what to create, when I am blocked, stuck… what happens to my reality then? How do I know what story to live in?
Or does it go the other way around, do our worlds create our words? Are the stories we tell forever trying to catch up to the reality that they are describing? Is it that it is only through words that I can understand the reality I am living in, or is it that the reality that I am living in only comes to formation when I put words to it, when I speak it into being?
Of course it has to be the second one. Things happen whether I am there to talk about them or not, whether I am there to wrap them in a story or not, but do the stories not also shape the things that happen?
I have always understood myself to be a creative person, a person who likes to create.
I have been spending a lot of time this week with a friend who is in the process of creating something new, of bringing an idea into formed reality, of creating a new world. The process has brought me back to the feelings I had when I was creating worlds, when I took words that I spoke and made them into reality.
When I first began dreaming about the summer camp I wanted to create, the image that appeared in my head was of me sitting in the driver's seat of a pickup truck while a group of adolescents loaded some lumber into the truck’s bed.
At first I didn’t understand it. Why was this the image that took root in my mind? Why did my subconscious associate the fulfillment of this dream of opening a summer camp with the image of me and a bunch of teenagers in a pick up truck? After thinking about it I realized that this image, more than an image of kids playing soccer, or sitting in a circle together, or working on an art project, spoke to the specificity of what I wanted in the kind of camp community I was hoping to create. This image showed me that, more than anything else, my vision was of a space where adolescents and young adults had the opportunity to build the world that they wanted to see, and that my role was to support them by creating the conditions for them to do so. Yes, I wanted to lead. But my real vision was to create the canvas on which others could practice creating. The world I wanted to make was a world of creation.
A couple of years after I first had this vision, we opened a summer camp. It was the beautiful fulfillment of a dream. Over the ten years that I ran this summer camp and outdoor education programs, there were many moments that felt like they encapsulated the feeling, the essence of that original vision that I had. A few even came close to looking just like it. We did have a pick up truck that I drove, and there were many times that I sat in the driver’s seat while my teenage and young adult staff jumped in and out of the truck’s bed as we hauled supplies from one part of the camp to another.
Eventually, I started teaching some of those young adults on my staff how to drive, and a few of them would become the ones sitting in the driver’s seat while younger staff jumped in and out of the truck’s bed. On the last retreat that our organization ever ran I was walking across the soccer field, reflecting on this incredible journey, when I looked up to see the truck driving across the camp, a couple of counselors riding in the truck’s bed. On closer inspection I noticed that it was one of the younger counselors driving the car. The older staff members had, without my knowing it, taken it upon themselves to start teaching the younger counselors how to drive, and were all taking it in turn to be the ones driving the truck and the ones jumping in and out of the truck’s bed as they went hauling supplies around the camp.
As they drove past me laughing and enjoying each other’s company in the world they were creating, I stood there awestruck, barely able to contain the emotion I felt at seeing this vision I had come to fruition in a way I could never have imagined.