Laura Catherine Mace

Category: Musings

  • And What of Hugs?

    Dear Teacher of Teachers,

    And what of love? Is there a place for affection to be expressed without fear? Is it self-evident and safe? Or is it too much like vanity? Some will understand, some will not, where do we draw the line in the sand to tell the tides of the heart, ‘no, you must not follow the moon past this point?’

    I feel the sadness of favoritism, of abuse, of calamity, of power, of loneliness and desperation– all creating the strange and hurtful situations that have made our society so suspicious of bonds between one person and another in institutional settings, breaches of boundaries and trust, children confused for peers, possession confused for love and guidance.

    Teacher of Teachers, is there a place for, “I love you’s” when you feel their pain more deeply than your own? Can you throw your arm across their shoulders when you are proud? Is there time for a smile of relief and gratitude when they help you solve a problem?

    Oh how I miss camp, how I miss the truth of the woods: We are together here, desperately together in a wide universe that gave birth to us, but that has turned us loose to make us strong and beautiful and then, eventually, kill us. All we can do to live in some gratitude and contentment is to put our arms around the whole of human-kind, and take a deep, deep breath.

    In Gratitude,
    Laura

  • When the apocal…

    When the apocalypse came, it was only soft rain. Gray mist cat-feeting over the mountains, relentless tapping on the tin rooftops, deceptively pleasant splashy puddles and dew-laden blades of grass. People submitted with faint sighs, accepting their doom with cups of tea, pulling the covers up around their necks. Yes, it rained and it rained until everything was choked with life and everyone was quite still.

    —That’s what I think about all this rain lately.

  • Yes.

    Forget about having an identity crisis and get some identity capital. … Do something that adds value to who you are. Do something that’s an investment in who you might want to be next.

    Meg Jay: Why 30 is not the new 20

    via TED | Talks | List.

  • Little Flames

    Little flames… sitting below the big flame, looking up. Blushing. Delight and wholeness in the sun searing through the moist veils of atmosphere, of strange tingling magnetic belts girding an iron core, none of those things known to most people throughout most of time, but felt somehow, in an atomic, there sort of way.

    All present here, all together. Sitting, one is tempted to superlative and hyperbole.

  • Remind me…

    Remind me...

    From my classroom

  • A Letter to Her Counselors

    “It’s amazing how much you need and respect the little things in life. Music, for example. Being at camp for two weeks with little to no music makes you appreciate it even more. The only music we get here is in the bus on the way to canoeing and at the camp dance. I grow fond of country music, any music really, that is played for us because it has such a big impact in my life.

    “Showers are another thing, not even long showers in scorching water but a quick, four-minute shower in lukewarm water in a dingy shower stall is magical. It makes you feel clean, especially when you only shower two to three times a week.

    “Finally, the most important thing you find at camp is true friendship and the meaning of family. A family isn’t always the people who you live with fifty weeks out of the year. Sometimes, it’s the group of people you spend two weeks with. When you are always with a group of people, you grow close, they know what is going on in your life. Judgements happen quickly at camp, and it’s hard to change a lot of the time. But they DO change, you realize the girls you think are cliquey and are going to be awful are the best people in the world! And the counselors change your life.

    “Counselors are those few guiding figures who change the way you see the world. You strive to impress them. And when you come across one counselor that is like you in every way, shape and form, you look up to them. A counselor, for the two weeks, is the guiding figure who supports you in everything. Without these people, camp wouldn’t be the same. They help you struggle through the thick and thin. They support you when you need it most. But most importantly, they praise you for being yourself. It changes who you are as a person.

    “I thank camp for so many things, because without it, I wouldn’t be the individual I am today. in the end, we all need to respect the little things, and not let judgement prevent us from the friendships that’ll last a lifetime. People usually need a push to realize this, and that’s what camp has done for me.”

    -One of my awesome CITs, 2013

    To all Camp Jackson staff, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. You have bled and loved and laughed and cried to succeed in the greatest of all tasks: changing lives forever. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

    Love,

    Laura

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  • I was a freshman in college once…

    Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial

    This is an excerpt from a paper I wrote at the end of 2007 about the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial in Washington D.C. I care that we all pay attention to that war, because it happened, because it is happening, because it will happen again, and because it is never simple. War is never a simple mistake.
     I didn’t talk much about the Wall or the design in the paper, just about the letters that were left there: Women write to dead strangers who might have been their husbands. Sons write to fathers who never held them. Foreigners write to Americans. Pacifists write to soldiers. There are no bodies buried at the Memorial, but many choose this place to commune with their dead. THIS IS THE RESULT OF WAR, the letters tell us, THIS IS THE ONLY MEASURE OF THE INCALCULABLE COST OF HISTORY. The letters do not bring a cohesive political conclusion, or demonstrate what should have been done instead of what was.
     The only absolute statement that the letters leave historians and Americans is one of grief and love. I found it fitting that in the last lecture before I turned this paper in, we talked about the reasons why men fought. In a history class, one studies the dates and the debates, the decisions of powerful men and the opinions of the masses. But the individuals involved in war experience the tangible side of the abstract outlines available in history books. One Veterans writes: “We crept “point” together and pulled “drag” together. We lay crouched in cold mud and were drenched by monsoons. We sweated buckets and endured the heat of dry season. We burnt at least a thousand leeches off one another and went through a gallon of insect repellent a day that the bugs were irresistibly attracted to…You got a bronze star, only to walk into a booby trapped bunker and suddenly you had no face or chest.”
    In all the whirling patterns of cause and effect that study reveals, nothing is a simple as the fact that dear friends and dear kin died. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, however it should have been designed or however the war should have gone, means so much to many. Medals and monuments cannot bring back the dead, but they can bring consolation and healing to the living. At last, some of the dangling hearts that were denied their homecoming ceremony can grieve and exhale and let go. At the end of Larry Powell’s photographic tribute to the veterans, there is a single question, small and black on its own page: “Is war over simply because it ends?”