Meaningful Chaos That Makes My Heart Full: A Memoir
Well it is my absolute honor to introduce this beautiful soul to the Stomping Ground blog. If you have met this person, you understand what it means to know someone who truly listens to your deepest thoughts. Someone who is a soldier of human compassion, and with every human being she interacts with, leaves them with the question, “how can she be that amazing?” For the 2020 strategic plan, there might just be an hour dedicated on how to get her back at camp. She is Emily Kramek! Explorer Panda, SUNY New Paltz graduate student, epic dancer, expert of human spirit and the definition of unconditional kindness. Read on, and grab your tissues! - Ray
Oh my heavens, it is so hard to begin writing about camp! I just have so much to say about this magical place and no concept of how to concisely fit these words on paper. This place has taught me so much about connection, and community, and comfort, and myself. I’ll always be grateful, and ready to gush about it at a moment’s notice. OKAY WOAH.
Getting the opportunity to work as a Panda for Explorer village this past summer led me to a brand new, and overwhelming appreciation for a concept I believe my dear friend Alice has coined, “meaningful chaos”. I’m not sure what the new layout of the beautiful Saratoga Springs camp is going to be, or what the age groups for each village will be, but Explorer village at the Amahami site was for our littlest campers, ages six to about nine, and full of near-constant energy. Explorer also happened to be our biggest village on camp this past summer, so it is easy to see how a larger number of kids from an age group that typically has the most energy could quickly inform a norm of chaos in the village at all hours. Essentially, what I’m getting at is that things were always high energy, fairly loud, somehow always covered in jelly and sunbutter, so fun and beautifully chaotic.
Each Sunday when new campers would arrive, we would have a village meeting to set some expectations for how we wanted to treat one-another and exist together in our temporary home. Basically, we just used this meeting to figure out how to make the chaos a little bit safer, a little bit more intentional. We developed a few mantras that stayed with us for the bulk of the summer, and stay with me even still as they’ve become applicable in so many different spaces in my life. One being “chaos, but make it kind”, again, coined by Alice, and another coined by one of our campers, Maggie, which says “be safe, be kind, be gentle”. Both of them stuck around and seemed to have the effect of a tight hug on the village, I was so in.
After feeling the effect of that imaginary hug, I started to see meaningful chaos all over the grid there. It was all the small moments that Laura begs us not to forget to soak up, and all of the wild night programs cooked up inside of George’s brain, and in all of Nick’s unprompted monologues in weird voices, in Chrintz’s spontaneous dance parties, in all of Nina’s characters, in all of Ned or Brian or Casey’s outrageous activities... I keep writing these examples and I’m starting to wonder if I just have weird friends and that might not have all that much to do with the point I’m trying to make? I’m going with it.
From the outside looking in there are just so many crazy and weird things going on at camp that become so wonderful and magical as you get closer. It’s all of the ongoing mayhem that fills a day at camp which allows for soft and special moments to take place, and stand out. I remember sitting in on a cabin’s embers one night, and listening to all of the girls laugh about how one of them took a gigantic fall trying to capture a newt while they were dressed up in a fairy costume. One of them had fallen and another was not able to turn off the funny voice she was using in time to comfort her, and wound up asking if she was alright in an elmer-fudd-esque voice. They laughed about this muddy tumble for what felt like hours, and it became the inside joke that glued them all together for the week ahead. It feels silly to try and explain a profound meaning out of this innocent little interaction, but for me, it did a pretty good job of illustrating the kind of atmosphere for connection we try so hard to foster at Stomping Ground. We talk all the time about how the foundations of camp are empathy, self-direction, and possibility, and all three of these tokens are present in little stories like this one. Having the freedom to run around and get dirty and silly with fellow campers during village time, and during so many other points during the day, leads the opportunity for strange and wonderful passing moments, that they might take with them when they go.
Kids aren’t dangerous, and they know how to keep themselves safer than we expect them to, and they know how to care for each other better than we expect them to. Sometimes people would visit the village and look around at a group of kids digging a hole, just for the sake of digging a hole, with the shovel I tried to hide but they found anyway, or see elaborate unprompted face/body painting, or fort building, or balance-beam creating, sword fighting, or any other kind of self-directed activity. Don’t get me wrong, I always remained with the group, but the kids facilitated the activities, and I was always shown that in self-directed utter chaos, kids know how to be safe, and kind, and gentle without any adult steering the ship. It served the group so well to get to play with each other in a world they could make their own, where they could honor the boundaries we had set in place for the village but let the rest be up to them. From there, they can create spaces to make believe, be creative, be wild, be quiet, be themselves, be with themselves, be with each other. All chaos, but make it kind.
It’s moments like these that brought me to seek out this kind of meaningful chaos in my own world outside of camp. I just recently began an internship at a school for students on the spectrum, and I was literally given the opportunity because I told my now supervisor that I love chaos and finding magic within it. She took this quite literally and has since thrown me into all kinds of chaos, and I’m so grateful. Meaningful chaos can look different in different settings, but the base of it all stays pretty much the same -- leaving room for chaos also leaves room for meaning and magic.
Ugh. I love camp.