Lamp of Love Brings Summer-Long Project to a Close
By Ben Woods
Twelve weeks and 12 rays later, our Law of the Woods project has come to an end. Faced with a summer at home, our campers and staff dug into their memories, put their thoughts to paper, and channeled their creative energy—all in response to the prompt: “What does the Law of the Woods mean to you?”
Over the past three weeks, our community reflected on the Lamp of Love, whose precepts—Be kind, Be helpful, Be joyful—form a timely coda to a timeless code of ethics. Below are the submissions we received.
Be Kind
Photo by Liz Hattemer
Photo by Kate Downey
“Be kind — Do at least one act of unbargaining service each day.”
Be Helpful
“Be helpful — Do your share of the work.”
Original art by Isa Arena
Photo by Kate Downey
Photo by Liz Hattemer
Be Joyful
Photo by Alice Petty
“Be joyful — Seek the joy of being alive.”
Being joyful is:
Waking up early to watch the sun rising over Rainy Lake
Campers hugging, crying and laughing as they reunite after a year apart
Accomplishing a tough portage (literally and figuratively)
Hearing the sound of loons calling
Enjoying the sauna after a cold swim
Eating the meals that come from the Ogichi kitchen
Tailwinds
A mosquito-free night
Balance time
Watching campers return after tripping
Being grateful
Candles lit, voices singing "I want to linger a little longer…”
—Johanna Ernst
ESSAY By Teresa Baños
Paddling alongside multicoloured cliffs of ancient rock, with every paddle stroke a glint of sunlight reflects back to me, nourishing my aesthetic sensibility and my hungry soul. We turn a corner—our parade of mismatched canoes out of sync with the waves—when we spot them: Within arms’ reach above the lapping waves, sacred pictographs bless these cliffs. Moose, canoes, hands delicately settled on the wall seeming both entirely natural to it and uniquely a holy human intervention. As I stare at the pictographs in awe, I think to myself: “I get it! I have sought and found the joy of being alive.” This moment right here is what everyone has been telling me about.
“The joy” feels just like the weightless floating of your swift and imminent journey towards the water after you’ve jumped from a cliff. Your body gives in to the laws of physics, but your lungs seem to be one step behind, still moored in the overhanging pine trees above and for a moment you are starved of golden air. And then the thrill: your body suddenly immersed in water covering every inch of you while your lungs try and catch up. You have no choice but to surface triumphantly; like a newborn baby you gasp for air and your lungs burst with delight. I think that’s what finding the joy of being alive feels like.
But today my butt is sore not from hours of sitting on a canoe seat, but from an idle yet exhausting day of job hunting. Where is the joy here? I wonder. Out with the landscapes I have etched into my heart, there is little of that wild, incessant beauty where I stand today. No sprawling lakes to bathe and lose myself in, no raindrops on my skin or smoke trapped in my hair. My four walls hug and squeeze me tight so I cannot hear the wind at night, wind that in the wild calls me to dream a restful dream. Where is the joy here? I wonder. I hear my heart beating, and I’m reminded that even far, far away from the call of loons, I am alive. And if there is joy in being alive, there must be joy here too, and I must answer the call to seek it.
I look for it, but I struggle to find it sometimes. You see, way out there in the land beyond impalpable worries, joy seeks you. It’s true. Even as a storm drenches you to the bone and with you all the firewood that might keep you warm and feed you, joy is seeping through. Every pebble of the rain is charged with an extra concentrated dose of joy, and in order to seek this joy you must simply stand or sit and let it soak through you. In the wilderness, to seek the joy of being alive is to surrender yourself to the world and watch as it lands on you like a dragonfly is sure to land on a stationary paddle.
But here? It’s hard to picture joy manifesting in the middle of a life that jumps and shakes from one thing to another without time for a breath. But where there is life, there is joy. It is simply a little trickier to find than it is on a canoeing trip. How does one do it? Where do I look for it? Let me tell you about what has worked for me.
The first and most crucial step has been to be willing to fall in love with the ground my feet stand on. Blaming my surroundings for my joyless routines is an easy move. It’s rather comfortable to fantasise of a lake in the middle of the forest where joy grows endemically, a rare fruit that simply could not grow in my home climate. Confronting the fact that I can be responsible for my own joy is a little heavy, but it is something I need to rest on my shoulders and balance. Once I accept this responsibility, I unlock its power.
I look now, through the photos of my canoe trips up north, and having demystified their memories, I can now see the common thread between my life in the woods and my life here, in the mundane. Through the pictures I can see that while there is a lot from the wilderness I cannot bring into my city life, there are little things that I was able to notice way out there must surely be around here too.
For instance, on canoeing trips I am constantly awed by the light. Whether it’s the way it filters through the forest canopy and onto the ground, the way it bounces off the water on a sunny day, or its changing hues as the sun sets. It’s something I notice a lot in the backcountry, but light doesn’t exclusively exist out there, it’s simply something I feel drawn to notice in the woods once I’ve shed all my home life worries and placed myself faithfully into the moment. What if I sought these nuggets of joy within my life?
And so, I’ve begun to actively seek the joy of being alive through a smaller more universal vessel. Sure, I cannot replicate the camp community from across the ocean, and Scottish winds are extremely unpleasant to paddle in, so I can’t head out on the water. What I can do, however, is look at how the same light that captivates me out in the Quetico reflects, refracts, and casts shadows here, in Glasgow. Suddenly, joy has found its way into my life in a way I wasn’t sure I’d ever find it. The way my friends’ lampshade creates patterns on the wall, the setting sunlight’s golden illumination of my duvet cover, the deep orange streetlamps in winter, the way in which car headlights reflect off wet pavement on rainy days…. These are all things that existed around me but passed completely unnoticed, and now they are my treasure chests of joy. I am seeking and finding joy in being alive, even when it feels hard to find.
It’s taken me a little while to arrive at this point. For so long, it seemed to me that the only place I could find joy in living was in the middle of a lake on a sunny day, surrounded by loving people. It made leaving camp excruciatingly difficult at the end of the summer—I felt like I had discovered this secret treasure of joy and it was ripped out of my hands for nine months out of the year—I was living life always looking to when I’d next be able to find myself in a canoe, completely ignoring all that enriched my life at home. But since I’ve been searching for the little quirks of light, I’ve noticed joy become easier and easier to find in other places, too. I’ve started noticing how often the birds are singing even on a busy street, I love seeing fruit neatly arranged at a supermarket, and when I make all the green lights on my walk to meet a friend, I can’t help but skip down the street. These are all extremely normal, seemingly boring sides of city life, and yet by finding the part of my brain that treasures the little details when out in the woods, tiny good things are suddenly bursting with joy. I would never have dreamed it possible, but I am living in the sunshine, even in the Scottish winter when the sun sets at 3 p.m.
I wonder now, whether this experience resonates with you as you read this. I know little about your day to day or your particular relationship to joy. And while maybe light is not your particular joy bringer, I can guarantee that there is something that has that power to brighten up your life with joy. I’m not sure what your thing will be, but I am nearly certain that there is something that can illuminate your routines, too. Maybe you read this and scoff, unconvinced. I’m not here to tell you how to find joy, I’m simply hoping to show you that even small instances of joy can accumulate and turn a frustrating workday or dull school year into something worth celebrating. The joy one feels when on a canoeing trip, surrounded by friendly faces and inundated with the feeling of freedom…that is an explosive all-consuming joy, and yes, it’s not necessarily easy to find outside of a canoe. But I think that is OK. To seek the joy of being alive is an active mission, I urge you not give up on it simply because it doesn’t seem straightforward. We’re not called to ‘experience’ the joy of being alive, we are called to SEEK it. Let’s play hide and seek with joyful living, let’s go and find all the nuggets of joy in our every day that make life so wonderful to live, collect them in a jar like they’re pretty seashells. Let’s seek and find the joy of being alive. I’m finding it. I hope you are too.
Photo by Ethan Kiernan