At right: Christine Monahan along with the Tokyo Camp campers whom she taught English during session 4, just ended. Christine is a former FV camper from way back who recently came back to help out with the Tokyo program at the end of the summer--when they switch it up a bit and have some campers who want to learn some English (usually it's the opposite: campers' parents hope the kids will brush up on Japanese language and culture). Below is Christine's lovely statement about her experience, which she titles "A Perpetual Moment of Euphoria."I never used to connect with such statements as "when I die, I want to be buried at..." or, "I'd like to die doing...," or "If I died right now, I'd be happy!" When you're dead, who cares where you are!? You won't know about it--you'll be dead!--and only a miserable curmudgeon would dwell on thoughts of death while enjoying a beautiful setting, or experience. I came to realize, though, that for some of us, those statements actually can have very little to do with dying, and everything to do with how alive we feel at that moment. There seems to be an innate feeling that if we could extinguish ourselves at a place or during a sensation that everything we value is felt without interference and perfectly synthesized, we can preserve that sensation infinitely--a perpetual moment of euphoria.
Is there a place you can go that blows the emotional cholesterol out of your system? Is there a place you can go to where you feel purged? Emotional clogants seem to clear out of the arteries of your soul, and you seem to hear the wind whistling though the sinuses of your spirit? For me, that wind smells like the nutty-sweet aroma of the ferns at Frost Valley. I have had moments there where even the very barrier of my body seems to dissolve. The need for self protection is replaced by an environment that is teeming with wellness--velvet-skinned raspberries grow wild, and taste the same as the way they did when, as a child, when I picked them walking barefoot on biscuit-shaped rocks from the lake to the "Girl's Dining Hall;" cool air that pushes against my skin, makes me buoyant like the waters of Lake Cole. Hummingbirds hang over wildflowers like chips of jade--they are green place markers on a page of blue sky. The mountains all around hold worlds of their own that I have been made to know I can hike to, and live in, like one of their native creatures.
Then there's the architecture--the rare, rich woods of "The Castle" rooms whisper to me about exotic forests far away. The lodges and "Ad Office" (as we use to call it--I still do) rise up off the earth on piles of river stone almost as though they formed there, part of the Catskill landscape itself.
Of course there is the work--that they are paying me to teach English as a Second Language here is a small miracle in itself-- a job I discovered four years ago, oddly, on Craigslist, a few weeks after returning from a year teaching in Mexico, jobless and hungry for work. As a teacher at my YMCA camp I can combine the "core values" of honesty, caring, respect and responsibility with my own creativity, and draw from years and years of Wawayanda tradition, too. When this culminates, for me, inhibitions dissolve, and I really do want it to go on forever!
