The first time I managed to sink deep into the silence and come bobbing back up with a message, I was standing around the fire circle closing my seventh year returning to Friends Camp. I remember something like a toad crawling up my throat, then leaping out into the fire with a cough, and then I was speaking. I shared with my counselors and fellow campers that camp had been an opportunity each year to dislodge myself from expectations, and remember who I love to be, and try out being that. The drive home was streaked with tears, and in September I tucked myself into a school desk again and wondered what wholeness had failed to follow me there.

By now, I had made a few close friends at home, and had brought them along to see what Friends Camp was about, in order to show them what I was about. In our off-season of September through June, we sat there in individual desks divided by classroom walls, missing camp together.

In search of year-round wholeness, my friends and I tried to trace the essence of Friends Camp. Yes, we were gathered in a mass of humans our age every day of the week at school, but no, it did not ignite that same sense of community. Were our classmates just worse community members than our cabin mates? But then, there was no quality assurance check for becoming a Friends Camp camper, so clearly something organizational was at play in both places that evoked something different from the people in them. The word Friend was our trail, and through it we found our local Friends meeting.

This month, we [Friends Journal] focus on what Friends can do to help younger people like Annie embrace Quakerism.

Read the September issue online.