There’s one full circle we’ve drawn in the past years of Kanuga. Kids are automatically in the Friday night talent show – the daytime programs do group acts for every age group. So when my sisters and I were little, we were in it every year, in our 3 different age groups. My father often did a parody of some sort, which the adults loved and the kids acted like they understood. More recently, we had a series of years where we didn’t attend the Friday show because there were no kids of age. But now the younger generation is part of it, and so this year we had a family decision that we were going to go the show – and not only go to it, but perform in it.

So my father created a parody psalm, and I worked up a juggling routine with my ancient glowballs (and my blue one died – yay, new juggling equipment to buy!). And we went, and laughed at the kids, and clapped, and sat very still being very nervous (in my case), and my dad did his usual brilliant job of convincing the kids they were amused, and actually amusing the adults, and I juggled in the dark, and finally stopped shaking about five minutes after I got offstage. There were some other great acts, too – Adam did a medley that tells the life of Jesus as song parodies, and Susan sang Somewhere Over the Rainbow with the full intro, which you hardly ever hear anymore. It was the best Friday show I remember, and we got a lot of great comments, too.

Last week was Kanuga. This is a place in the mountains of NC that I’ve been going with my family since I was born – literally, my first year there, I was 2 months old and slept in a dresser drawer. Our family has history there. Lots of history. We keep track of who’s there each year, and there’s always some point when we flip through the old records and try to remember – why was I gone just for Tuesday two years ago? Oh right, I was at Creative Circus and in the middle of a quarter- with 3 classes on Tuesday, I managed to go to class and yet still be at Kanuga for most of the week. Three years ago my middle sis and brother-in-law were in Okinawa, so missed entirely. And five years ago my eldest sister and her family didn’t come at all, because she was eight and a half months pregnant.

But these are the exceptions, the times when other things got in the way – in general, everyone comes to Kanuga, every year, for the whole week. And why? Because it’s how we recharge, refocus, renew. We remember why we love each other, why we miss each other, what matters to us. We don’t have to worry about the stuff of daily life – cleaning, cooking, coming up with things to do. The dining room serves every meal, and though it may not always be what we would’ve chosen, it’s good and we don’t have to make it or clean up after it. The kids have activities every day – Baker Building for little ones, Youth Program, and then Kanuga Outdoors. There’s the climbing wall, and the lake, and hikes around the property. You make a new tie-dye every year – and those get passed down, so when I was in seventh grade, I had something ridiculous number of tie-dyed shirts – something like 14. As a kid, it’s awesome – there are other kids to play with, planned activities every day, and we always had the option of skipping program to read a book on the screened porch if we preferred. As an adult, it’s even better – the kids disappear during the day, coming back to the cabin with crafts and stories and scraped-up elbows. We all spend the evening together – going to the evening entertainment – a poet, the square dance, a musician, and if we’re not interested in it, we end up back in the cabin playing games. As kids, we loved the moment at the end of each night’s entertainment when we got a dollar to go buy a candy bar at the canteen, and now as adults, we still enjoy the one week where we all eat candy together at 9 at night.

Now we’re all back in our respective homes, but we have the connections and insights that we all gained over the past week to carry us through the next year until we get to do it again.

I just spent the better part of a week at a juggling festival. Conveniently for me, the International Juggling Association’s annual festival was here in Winston this year, which meant I got to attend while not having to take off a ton of work. So I spent the mornings working, and the afternoons/evenings juggling.

My favorite thing about juggling festivals is the opportunity to pass clubs with lots of different people. Club passing is inherently social, since it requires two people at minimum, and you make a pretty strong connection when you’re counting on the other person not to hit you with their passes, and they’re counting on you to avoid hitting them. You also have to be in rhythm with each other, which means paying close attention to each other in general.

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I had a beautiful day today – started out a bit iffy, with a photo shoot that’d been rescheduled three times for weather already. This morning it was incredibly hazy, but we really couldn’t reschedule again, so we decided to do the indoor shots we needed and hope the fog would burn off in time to get a good outdoor shot. I’m not yet totally confident on photo shoots – the balance between the photographer’s eye and my authority as a designer is delicate, and it’s not a line I have a lot of practice walking. It went really well, though- we got beautiful shots, the fog burned off so we could get everything we needed, and we’ll have files on time to make our deadline.

While we stood outside in this perfectly amazing day, I had a sudden need to go juggling. So I emailed a friend, and we met up in the park after work. He’s not a particularly stable club passer, so I spent the time mainly focusing on delivering perfect throws and practicing recovering unsteady catches. There’s always space in club passing to be a little closer to perfect. It was a lot of fun – catching back up with him and reviewing my basics.

So my day was bookended by something that I feel very uncertain about, and something I’m very certain of, and both of them went wonderfully. Way to build confidence!