I just got back from Soul Camp 2007. It’s an annual event where some of the members of our local integrated life studies group get together at our host’s cottage at Side Lake, Minnesota, for an intensive week of study and discussion.
Our host Ron is from MN and stays at his family’s tiny old lakeside cottage each summer. It’s about 100 years old and has room for about 6 to hang out.
Ron is also the author of the Fifth Way Press line of books that I publish—more here on this website under the Philosophy link in the menubar. There are also a couple items explaining more about what we’re up to in this group effort toward sanity.
For the past several summers we’ve been reading Russians for our summer seminar. Soloviev and Berdyaev, with an emphasis on the later. These are mystic philosophers from the Orthodox tradition. B in particular wrote his last works in light of the aftermath of WW2 and the influences of the existentialists. They seemed to have a mission like ours: how to think in a way that helps us to live in today’s world.
The way we do it is that we read the works ahead of time, ideally twice. Then we try to glean deeply during the retreat. A “big” book always needs several readings to start to get at the meat of it. Of course the best have something to offer in repeat readings throughout your life. That’s the test, isn’t it. The books that people read throughout their life and keep getting more from—those are the anchors. Media hipsters today are fond of saying “there are too many books” but the chaff is easily separated. If you want to simplify, go for the meat. How many books does anyone even have a hunch they’ll reread for years? Maybe one such book is added every few years. There are a lot of trees being cut down but there’s always a shortage of quality.
Seminar attendees have stayed in nearby cabins but they’re getting pricey and I like more of a get away idea so I pushed for camping in the woods across the lake. I found a great secluded site in the state park and several of us went for this idea and brought tents and such. It worked out great, thankfully. The weather was perfect. Our host noted that if it had been rainy, cold or windy—as it can easily be—that we might’ve found ourselves distracted from our study mission. Good point. But I think that tarp science and campfires can allay most troubles, should they arise.
Each day we would read, go on walks and jaunts, then meet for a huge noon meal (“dinner”) then chat around the table then meet again for supper later on then meet for a few hours in the evening for discussion.
This is, of course, something that any group of people could do, as a break from everyday life, a time to reorient and recharge. Hopefully a lot of people are indeed doing just that!
It probably helps, though, to make sure that your time away includes a lot of unstructured time where you can just let things fall away, time to work on liberating your head from any tired rut it might be stuck in.
Ron did all the real cooking. We had cereal at our campsite each morning. Ron would also fit in reading and reflection. Every day he also rode his bike (Huffy, locked into one gear) around the block in the morning then rowed around the lake in the afternoon (old bass boat). Amazing how he fit it all in. It’s his super-effort each summer, it seems to me. He lives a quiet life year-round, otherwise. (Except for our Thursday meetings when he’s in town.)
I really appreciated the chance to use a canoe as transport. Our campsite was a half mile across the lake from the cottage. Each evening we’d paddle to the discussion group. We’d break up around midnight then paddle back. Every night the sky was a black bowl exploding with brilliant stars. I saw shooting stars with long tails.
I also really liked the campground life. A little dirt road ran past our site beyond a little screen of shrubbery. Kids were biking up and down that road all day, big and little, loud and quiet. Adults, too. It was cute seeing the difference between the posses of girls and boys—boisterous versus singsong.
The work we read this year was Berdyaev’s “Truth and Revelation,” 1947, his last work. Textfiles of it are available online for free. Here’s a tidbit:
“Revelation is frequently understood as a form of divine determinism. This arises from a natural interpretation of the relation between creator and creature. The divine determinism is an echo of the determinism that belongs to this world. But given a spiritual understanding of the relation between God and the world everything is changed. Everything becomes creative in character. I have already said many times that spirit is not being, that spirit is freedom, that it is a creative act which is effected in depth.”
