lights on a lake

My thoughts and readings lately have put me into a sort of tailspin...got me thinking about things past and future. There's a part in Nouwen's 'The Genesee Diary' that says..."It seems as if I am being slowly lifted up from the gray, dull, somewhat monotonous, secular time cycle into a very colorful, rich sequence of events in which solemnity and playfulness, joy and grief, seriousness and lightness take each other's place off and on."
Next to that highlighted passage, I wrote "DL" in parenthesis because that passage brought me back to years at Deerfoot. There was always a feeling there, of being shut off from the outside world. So much so, that as a staff member, trips to town to do the laundry were almost surreal. Kinda gave you the feeling that you had been raised by wolves and someone was suddenly exposing you to polite society! Deerfoot Lodge, and the beautiful old country around it, are a beautiful mix of solemnity and playfulness...where we shared times of extreme joy and sometimes heavy sadness with our new families. We conquered mountains ecstatically; and we suffered through rainy nights under dripping tarps miserably...and we knew that a new day approached.
One of the things that has stayed with me from the summers there was the candlelight ceremony at the end of each camp session. As night falls, everyone gathers along the lake front with unlit candles. One is lit, and that flame passes from candle to candle. It's an awesome sight to see the flickering lights as they move through the woods and spread out...and a voice booms out over the still lake and tells us that when we leave this place, we are to go into the world outside as lights to that world.
I miss those times of awe, when something was able to break through the youthful clowning around and settle quietly into my heart.