I have returned from Camp.  Patti Digh’s 3rd annual Life Is A Verb Camp to be specific.  My 2nd.  I make a note that the first was during a full moon and this ended the day of the red moon.  That is probably important.  These Camps are magic – the tribe that gather’s around Patti creates magic.  It is hard to return after “having been to the mountain.”  As Jonathan Kozol says in his book, The Night Is Dark and I am Far From Home, one does not return from the mountain to pick up the old dialogue.

No, one does not.

For almost a year (and only a year because before then it did not bother me), I have been trying to figure out how one with a fiery, fierce, passionate nature responds to issues and dialogue that seem, at the very very best, purposely hateful.  How one responds to that without one’s usual fiery, fierce, passionate Aries nature arising ready for blood.

No.  I don’t have the answer to that….yet.  But Camp magic being as it is, I have a glimmer.

Sonya Renee Taylor was one of our speakers.  She is an amazing, fiery, fierce and passionate woman and she said:  “oppression comes from not loving yourself.”  There’s the glimmer.  Here’s the connection:  if I love myself, I am at peace within myself and feel no need to explain myself to anyone.  I have started to think that perhaps the Aries Attack Woman comes from a place of insecurity.  A place of feeling victimized by the outside world (those of you who know me, I know you do not think of me as a victim by any long stretch.  And neither do I, but I am following this trail deep down and I think there is something to this).  I give others the ability to make me think, somewhere in my deep subconscious, that I am a victim and must defend myself.  I am not a victim.  Therefore, no one has the power to make me a victim unless I give it to them.  It doesn’t matter what it looks like from the outside, on the inside I am not a victim, I am standing in my power, and that. shifts. everything.

This is new thinking.  The kind of new thinking that gets sparked at Camp.  I am going to write of this journey towards my power (again.  That center tends to move.  We get bigger.  The former center is no longer center.  Sometimes we don’t notice.  I intend to notice).  And of the people who are my support along the way.

The other thing about camp.  You just never know where a conversation will lead.  And sometimes (this time!) you get to meet face-to-face people who have hither-to only been letters on a page or a voice on the phone (you know who you are!).  Who says friends can’t find each other on Facebook?  They aren’t looking hard enough!  So, conversation:  a lunch conversation has launched an expanded understanding of the “word for the year” phenom which has been around for a decade or so.  Way expanded.  So expanded that had the conversation not happened, I would NEVER have stumbled across it.  Thank you Danna Schmidt!

Danna kindly sent me many documents about choosing and using and expanding your word for the year.  I am going to start working on that this month.  It’s a way to keep in touch with Camp Magic, and also to follow what was birthed there with that conversation.  I invite you along for the ride as I plan to work it out here as I go.

For those of you who have never experienced a Patti Digh Camp, I am pleased to say that there will be one in North Carolina in 2016.  I have already started my fund to get me there.  I am tithing to that fund, honoring the goddess within me who is nurtured and filled up in these gatherings.  There are no specific details yet.  I will share them as soon as I have them.  You’re welcome.