The Benefits of Friendship
Community is a funny thing. We talk about the Wayfinder community as if it was a living entity when really it’s a web of interpersonal relationships and a kind of commitment you make to people you have not met yet, but who have occupied space in that same circle that you do. We talk a lot about how that circle functions. How it welcomes new people with arms open. How it manages to hold the same type of space though never being made up of the exact same group of people. How your spot in it is always there for you, no matter how long you step away from it. Something else we talk about a little less often, is how our circle stretches out into the world past camp. The friendship that we form at camp, those individual strands of the community, are some of the strongest you will ever find in life.
Marika touched on something important about those relationships in her interview. She talked about how for people from camp out in the world “our lives still have relevance to each other.” This is not an easy type of relationship to find. With most of the people you meet in the world, once your shared experience or location is over with it goes the closer portions of your friendship. Obviously this isn’t always the case, and I’m not trying to say you can’t form lasting friendships outside of camp. I’m looking to highlight the amazing ability Wayfinder has built over the years to create generation of generation of real lasting friendships. We so often refer to ourselves as a tribe, and this is exactly what that has always meant to me. So many of the people who I grew up loving and trusting from camp are out in the world now, without time or ability to come back to Wayfinder. That doesn’t change the fact that tomorrow I could drop in on just about any of them and pick up our friendship right where we left off.
While it’s not the only thing we work on, or even the focus of much of what we do, the relationships built between Wayfinder’s participants are a crucial part of every single workshop we go through at camp. (Maybe the point is the friends we made along the way?) Game is a huge piece of this. After a game where you spend a lot of time playing with someone you don’t know that well, there is going to be a kind of closeness between you that wasn’t there before. That special kind of closeness that comes from shared experience. (If you can face down literal demons with someone friendship can’t be much harder, right?) The only feeling I have found similar to it is in people I have worked with, but those relationships are usually missing the other pieces we do at camp. The active work on trust and mindfulness in relationships.
Sitting in trust workshops together goes further than we realize in doing this interpersonal work for us. It establishes a baseline of trust that you just don’t get to have with people in very many situations. Often in trust we share some of our most personal discomforts, whether those be in the form of forging physical trust through touch or emotional trust by sharing a hardship we have been through. Being able to look at someone you intend to build a friendship with and see someone who already knows these things about you, who already seen some of the bits of yourself you try to keep from the world, and knowing that they want to become better friends with you regardless of (sometimes even because of) these pieces is a kind of relationship it is almost impossible to find, and certainly rare to find such a safe space to do it in.
With these rare elements added into our friendships from the start it seems only natural that the friendships we build hold relevance. The work we do at camp is to define ourselves as people. Playing in adventure games gives you the chance to explore different sides of yourself, to try on different personalities and ways of being and decide which you like best. Doing trust workshops gives you a chance to find that you can share the things that you have been through and find people who love you and hold no judgment of those things. Improv gives you a chance to have fun and embrace that ridiculous joyful kind of funny that comes when you just go for it. These are the things that people search desperately for in relationships throughout their lives. They are also things that people at Wayfinder give themselves over to with ease. Treasure the friendships you have been given, nurture that relevance, and keep as many of those people in your life as long as you can.
Written by Judson Easton Packard
Published 3/10/2017
Wayfinder has always lived in the written words of its community members. Any world we create and explore starts with someone hunched over a computer, furiously typing histories into existence. It seems natural then that Wayfinder have so many community members with a literary streak to them. We had the chance to sit down with Marika McCoola, whose book Baba Yaga’s Assistant was a New York Times bestseller and Eisner award nominee, and talk about the experiences she had at Wayfinder and the ways those have helped to form her as a teacher, a writer, an illustrator, and most importantly a person.
Being around for years and years of camp and adventure games it can be hard to pin point favorite moments or games out of all of them. One of the things that stood out most for Marika was a prop she designed and built. A stained glass window, which we still use in games today. “When everybody saw that for the first time all lit up at night, that totally made it. You can still kind of separate yourself as a creator and as the character you’re playing, and to see people react to that, and to make it magical for them was really exciting, which I suppose makes total sense because I’m a writer now, and I make worlds for other people to inhabit.” That magic she talked about, the look of wonder you see on players’ faces, is something she has truly been able to capture into her writing. The worlds which she builds are fantastical, and it is clear there is an understanding of what magic looks like in the real world behind the work that goes into to creating those written worlds. She clearly points to experiences at Wayfinder as putting up the scaffolding for a lot of that work, and we were lucky to have her building that kind of magic for us. Like I said that stained glass window is still in use, and never fails to produce a look of awe and wonder from players seeing it for the first time.
Closing Remarks:
There are a lot of words that get thrown around (both at camp and outside of it) until they become so called buzzwords and lose any semblance of meaning. Some of them particularly pertain to Wayfinder. Community. Trust. Fairy Realm. OK, that last one still means a whole lot, but the other two can be a little hazy. In the weeks where we’re not looking at what members of our community are up to nowadays, and how they’ve taken the lessons of camp and put some of those to work for them in their daily lives, this space will be used (among other things) to talk about some of the deeper ideals that might not always get the in depth attention they deserve. I’m going to start with trust. It’s going to take me more than one entry to fully unpack trust, what it is, and what it means to camp, particularly because the word can be used in so many ways to mean so many things, but for the purposes of this post, I’m going to be talking about communal trust, the kind of trust that stretches past any one relationship in a group and is given over to the everyone who occupies that space. It’s a kind of trust that we’re always building, even when we may not be aware of it.
Communal trust is a little different than the trust we are used to talking about. Usually we talk about trust as it exists on a person to person basis. Communal trust is something much bigger, something we’re much less likely to deal with in our everyday lives, primarily because you need to be rooted in a community in order to build is. Wayfinder is exactly that. To be clear I have a pretty exact idea of what my community looks like. When I imagine Wayfinder community I think of the faces of people I started meeting when I was 13 years old. The people who taught me how to live in that space, who I put so much work into forming myself after. It also includes the faces of 7 year olds whose parents snuck them into one of our day camps, changing a birthday on their form to make sure they can get into “that cool camp with the swords.” And every single face that I picture is someone that I trust. Not necessarily here are the keys to my car trust, but definitely I am comfortable being me in front of you and going to a fantastical world with you trust. It’s not that common of a thing to have an amorphous group of people (it’s hard to say who will be at any event seeing as that is reliant upon both hiring and the schedule of our dear participants) who you trust completely with yourself. Given that amorphous nature the collection of faces around the circle at any two camps is never going to be the same.
Even so we have groups of people who come sit in these circles, with people they might have just met, people they may never see again, and share their realest selves with no hesitation. Even if we don’t talk about it as much, or dedicate workshops to it, that kind of trust is still carefully crafted. It’s the basis on which we build pretty much everything else. A lot of different pieces of what we do go into building that but the frame of each day is a good place to start examining it. We open every day (whether at day camps or overnights) with a circle. Everyone sits down together and gets a chance to share about how they are feeling, to ask questions, to bring up concerns. People own up to mistakes and make apologies. They hand out appreciations. At the beginning and end of every week we have a circle where people get the chance to talk about what the experience means to them, to take a second to appreciate exactly what we do together at camp. It also comes in the form of the adventure game. Every time you play a game you end up playing roles with people you don’t expect to, having intensely emotional experiences in character with people you may have never had those with in real life. The fact is that no matter who you end up playing with you know that everyone will be playing their hardest. Everyone will go to those places with you. Wayfinder brings a place where you can show up and know that no matter who is at camp that particular week, you’re going to get people who are there bringing openness and acceptance. You’re going to get people there who come prepared to play, who are ready to match your intensity at every turn. If nothing else, you’re going to find people there who you can trust. Every. Last. One of them.