That same summer Eliza first went to Quaker camp, we later participated in a family camp at Vajrapani in Boulder Creek. A number of conditions fell into place to make it happen. We wanted to round out Eliza’s “spiritual sampler” with eastern religion. We were open to doing a camp as a family, as lack of programming and other children to play with was the kids’ main complaint from our previous extended camping trips. Julie had found a family camp whose availability and dates worked for us. They’d let us come in our van.
The final condition that enabled us to commit was that we said goodbye to our dog Fiona, who otherwise would have needed us to attend to her as she convalesced at home. She gave us so much, and it felt as if with her departure, she was granting us one final gift of enriching our family’s spirituality.
Attending family camp at Vajrapani was a transformative experience that opened a door for us. I’ll write more in future posts, but some thoughts for now:
- The campers and staff were remarkably friendly. Everyone made it a point to call us by our names on every encounter. It felt as if extroversion and warmth was a part of the spiritual practice and culture there and we benefitted from that
- The organization seemed tied to the continuing legacy of a few key lay individuals: the land itself was donated by a matriarch who’s adult daughters were key organizers— and in turn their children were the campers that were graduating out of the program. There were also many educators affiliated with the Tara Redwood pre-school, co-located with the sister site, Land of Medicine Buddha n Soquel.
- We didn’t spend that much time with monastics, except for a western nun, who made herself more accessible and available. The other monastics, who seemed to be exclusively middle-aged Tibetan monks, came around from time to time but there was a language barrier that kept us from fully interacting
- Silicon Valley’s influence could be felt - we learned about their prayer wheel project, which contained an impressively grandiose number of “Om mani padme hung” mantras, printed using atomic scale nanotechnology. Apparently the number of repetitions contained inside correlate to the strength of the prayer wheel, and in true Silicon Valley fashion, it was touted as having 1000x merit.
- I left the camp feeling lighter, more aware of my body and emotions, and ready to go deeper.
