May 18, 2007 - CAMP Matters

LETTERS From CAMP Rehoboth

CAMP Matters

The theme of this year's HeART of the Community art project is Six Degrees of Separation. First proposed by Frigves Karinthy in a short story titled "Chains," written in 1929, Six Degrees of Separation is the theory that any person on the planet can be connected to anyone else by six people. This year's HeART co-chairs Mary Beth Ramsey and Sondra Arkin selected it mainly for what it says about connection, but also for the added bonus that this is the sixth HeART of the Community event.

One of the great things about a resort communityand I've said this many times over the yearsis that it functions as a crossroadsa place of connection. We all have stories of new friends, business associates, and opportunities that come our way because of our Rehoboth connection. When we started CAMP Rehoboth 17 years ago we understood the importance of being connected to people all up and down the east coast. The CAMP Rehoboth Community Center has never been just about Rehoboth. Our mailing list is filled with people from Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and all the points in between. Our community extends for beyond the horizon line that we can see with our eyes.

The fascinating thing about the expression Six Degrees of Separation is that it uses the word separation to make us understand the word connection. The truthexpressed so beautifully by the black and white yin and yang symbolis that opposites always help to define one another. Without day we would not know night; without hot we would not understand cold; without death we would not know life.

We connect with one another in many different ways. Sometimes the connection is momentary, like a pinball, fast and furious, a ricochet. Sometimes the connections are intersecting lines, cross points, with many years in between. Sometimes they are deep and bonding: a friendship, a marriage, a partnership, lasting a lifetime.

All of us I imagine can look back on the important relationships in our lives and see the connections that brought us together. When I met my partner Steve almost 30 years ago, I was working for a Children's Theatre Company in Birmingham, Alabama, and the sequence of meetings and events that led us to one another seems perfectly clear to me even today. I met a man visiting Birmingham, and we liked one another and talked about the possibility of meeting in New York. I had a week off from work, had just purchased a new car, and I had a college friend who had been encouraging me to come to Washington for a visit. So I headed north with the idea that I would visit my friend William for a few days and then drive on up to Manhattan. The first morning I was in DC, a friend of William's, also from Alabama, called him to see if he could help her deliver some large paintings to offices at the White House. Bill said yes, but that he had a friend visiting and we would both need White House clearance. When we arrived at the office with the painting, the door opened and Steve said, "Hello Murray." The rest is history. And, by the way, I never made it to New York.

Our lives and relationships are woven together like fabric, the people we meet all over world, the threads, connecting and uniting us. We have the choice of making that fabric strong and richly colored or threadbare and torn to tiny shreds. We have the choice of building strong supportive communities and relationships or living in a world of anger, bitterness, hatred, and war.

We live in a time when the world has never been more connectedthe internet, mobile communication, instant media coverageand yet it is also a time of deep alienation and individual separation. From the planet itself to our country's relationship with the nations around us we are in a time of both awesome and terrifying changes. The global decisions made by our generations could mean life or death for the future children of earth.

Somehow we must choose connection over separation. Somehow we must learn to stop violence and hatred. Somehow we must stop being afraid of those who are different from ourselves. Our Community Center can't do all that, but we've all got to start somewhereand "there's no place like home."

Remember the feeling on the dance floor when the music is just right, and everyone's hands are up in the air, and no matter what else is happening in your lifegood or badthe moment comes when you just let go and feel the beat of the music like the heartbeat of the world. In that moment we let down our protective shields, we forget our separation, we allow ourselves to feel a part of something larger.

We connect. Too bad we can't dance the world back into good health.

Murray Archibald, is Founder and President of the Board of Directors of CAMP Rehoboth, and an artist in Rehoboth Beach.

Artwork on this page by: 1) Dale Sheldon 2) Brian Petro 3) Murray Archibald 4) Sondra Arkin.

LETTERS From CAMP Rehoboth, Vol. 17, No. 5 May 18, 2007