Creative Exuberance

One of the best epiphanies that happens at camp is when a young girl discovers her creative side, when she realizes that she can be artistic, imaginative and make wonderful things. Camp provides daily encouragement and opportunities to experiment with arts and crafts, to be bold and expressive using all kinds of physical media. At Rockbrook this means working with soft clay, yarns and fibers, threads, paint and ink, dyes, cloth, leather, wood and beads. Lately, the arts instructors have presented some pretty cool projects giving everyone something new to try. Girls are rolling out slabs of clay and pressing patterns made from scraps of lace. They’re sewing buttons and pieces of yarn to make sock puppets. With baskets of colorful thread, they’re learning about weft and warp, knit and pearl, back and half stitches. Blending melted crayons and thick black ink on paper, they’re creating bold multimedia designs. There’s incredible satisfaction here because your girls are seeing real results from their creative efforts. It’s showing them that amazing things can happen, far beyond what they might first expect, if they step out and trust their creative abilities.  What a great lesson for later in life, no matter what their eventual calling!

Today has also been filled with outdoor adventure trips, with girls and their instructors hiking, kayaking and climbing nearby forests, rivers and rocks.

The Hi-Ups (16 year-olds) took a “Hunger Games Hike” into the Dupont State Forest to visit a couple of sites where scenes from the recent movie were filmed. We scrambled up and over rocks to get the best view of Triple Falls, snapping pictures all the way. Feeling the cool spray at the bottom of a 100-foot waterfall while standing in bright warm sunshine is quite a feeling!

A group of kayakers spent the morning, and another the afternoon, paddling the French Broad River with superstar instructors Andria and Leland. They chose a great introductory section to practice ferrying (crossing the current from one side of the river to the other) and catching eddies (pulling into calm sections of the river, downstream from obstacles), both important whitewater kayaking skills. Reports back at camp were all positive and brimming with excitement.

Two groups of Middlers, meanwhile, spent the morning or afternoon activity periods rock climbing up on Castle Rock. There are six routes available up there and today the girls hopped on the two named “Shazam” and “Wham,” two of the more challenging options, each requiring both face and crack climbing techniques, as well as some real strength in steep spots. But boy can these girls climb! They may have slowed down to figure out a complex series of moves, maybe tried a tricky section more than once, but for the most part the girls scampered right up the 75-foot climbs. At the top, a fantastic view of the French Broad River valley is the reward, as well as the satisfaction of surmounting the challenges of the climb. When climbing, it can take real grit and concentration to forget how high up you are, and real muscle and balance to reach each handhold. These girls have got it all, and it shows!

Tonight we had a Disney-themed dinner where posters and other decorations transformed the dining hall and the campers and counselors dressed up like Disney characters (loosely interpreted- camp versions). Here too, creativity fueled the enthusiasm for dressing up. Using face paint, borrowed items of clothing, goofy hairstyles, and a few accessories, like “Mickey Ears,” we ate with various super heroes, princesses, a mermaid, a chipmunk, a chef, and a few bears. These Rockbrook girls love to dress up- “just for the fun of it.” They love the feeling of being silly, laughing their heads off with each other, posing and singing as loud as they can. It’s just their wonderful exuberance coming out in creative colorful ways.