We Gotta Get Out Of This Place

When I was fourteen I learned that there was more to life than what I could see. I didn't know how to handle the truth I had been given, so, as any child might do, I suppressed the information. I hid its real meaning from my conscious mind and tried to forget.

Do you ever find yourself in a situation and not know how you got there? The pieces that had to fit together in just the precise manner in order for your current reality to exist, seems impossible, yet here you find yourself? I was spending the summer in Oregon with my sister. I had been there a month or so and was bored. She had a friend who had a daughter that was around my age, so my sister contacted her friend to see if we could do something together.  It ended up the daughter was going away to church camp for a week and they wanted to know if I would I like to go too.

I had been to church camp a few times in Southern California. It was where you went to take girls out into the woods and explore each other's bodies. Now it could be that she said a "camp with her church" and I just assumed she meant a "church camp" and not an "Evangelical Christian Camp" which is where I found myself for the week.

I wanted out, but was trapped in the woods. I was alone. They figured out very quickly that I was not like them. Turning me into one of them became their mission. Even the "friend" who took me there was in on it. I could not hide, I could not escape.

They wanted to "save" me. What they did was show me that there was much more to reality, to life, than what I could see, and that my indifference to this actual reality affected it not one bit.

Years later, during my first sitting with Ayahuasca, the first thing she did, was remind me of that night, so long ago, and she gave me a new way to frame the incident, a new way to hold it. It still startles me, but I have learned to trust in her lessons.