It is Sunday evening and the last few Polycamp stragglers have backed out the driveway, swung left and nosed down the 2nd Line to home. It isn’t easy to describe what happens at these gatherings. Sometimes I’ll read, “It was a powerful experience, people shared.” What does that tell me? Isn’t it always?
Other times though, I’ll be hit by a painting of the gathering on the face of a friend, and know when they say it was powerful, that there were break-throughs.
If you could see my face as I tell you it was a powerful weekend, you would know there were break-throughs at Polycamp this year.
Stan Dale sometimes likened a breakthrough to the tiger and the hoop of fire. The finale of a big cat act was when the Tamer, in a battle of dominance, forces, threatens and argues the Tiger to jump through a hoop of fire. The story is that tigers are terrified of fire. True or not, the two fight this duel of whips and shouts vs fangs and roars.
Only a fool would put odds on the scrawny Tamer against 400 pounds of fury with iron jaws, but big surprise, the Tamer wins and the Tiger, despite all the fearsome anger, despite that a loss would mean a return to its cage with a hunk of a cow, and a bed of straw… jumps through the hoop, defeated.
But the moral of the story is what happens after the jump, when it is the Tiger who wins, having discovered there was nothing to be afraid of.
And sometimes the break-through opens a door to a garden of discovery. Those are the breakthroughs that taste the sweetest, the ones you are honoured to have been a part of.
The gathering was scheduled to end with a ritual called Hand-On-Heart. During a discussion there had been references to Stan Dale, who started the Human Awareness Institute and I recalled that I had written a book about Hand-On-Heart that I gleaned from cassette recordings he gave me. So we did a Hand-On-heart with his sayings. It added to the magic of this year’s Polycamp. I think I would like to do something with that book which has been sitting on my hard drive for at least 25 years.