Seated around the table, the men peered curiously into the basket.  Brown hands, tan hands, old hands, rough hands, hands that had traveled more miles than they cared to remember; they passed the basket around the table, pausing only for a moment just to reach in and choose, ever so carefully, a piece of themselves. Many years ago I worked with high school kids in a small, rural California high school on the Mendocino Coast.  Each fall we would take a group of kids away for a weekend of bonding and team building.  We brought a bag full of goodies, little knickknacks that we had collected, random things of no particular meaning and at night we would bring it out as we sat around the evening fire.

“Reach in,” we told them, “And pull something out.  Tell us how it represents something about you.”

It’s a simple exercise really, but only if you let your mind expand out of the box as metaphor forces us to do. “I am a whistle,” or “I am a button” does not come easily to those of us who think in terms of shopping lists and paying bills and homework assignments to be completed before the end of Easter vacation.  It takes a quiet moment, a moment spent listening to a voice that comes from deep inside, a voice that tells us something about who we are and what we need.

A frog, a lock, a seashell and a baseball.  A smooth round pebble, a candle and a sparkling crystal.  A screwdriver, a set of keys and a plastic bee.

And then, we wrote.

The best part of those trips so long ago was the evening campfire.  It’s funny how things are so much brighter in the dim light of the evening fire.  Seated around the fire, huddled close for warmth, we are not teachers and students, separated by age or rank or knowledge.  No longer an “I” we have become a “we”.  The day’s exercises, intentional in their purpose, have opened the door to a different kind of sharing, the beginnings of a bond that will continue when they return to the land of tests and papers and peer pressure.

A frog, a lock, a seashell and a baseball.  A smooth round pebble, a candle and a sparkling crystal.  A screwdriver, a set of keys and a plastic bee.

There was a story about a detour, a trip to Eureka that lasted two years, selling crystal jewelry from the back of a broken down VW bus.  Life is full of detours, we say.

A father writes about throwing a baseball with his son.  “Should he go to the Opening Day parade, he wonders?  To do so is to face the demons he carries with him each day.  “Go,” the others tell him.  “You need to go, for your son.”

There are stories of loss too, a wife, a father, a son.  We toss pebbles into the water.  Skipping stones two, three, four times as they glide, effortlessly across the surface and then disappear, never to be seen again.  Is that all there is to life?  Do we just skip together and then disappear?

There was a stint as a beekeeper.  We listened as he described the dance of the bees as the keeper gently coaxes them into the hive, calming the bees with a smoker and encouraging them to eat.  “No matter how many times I saw it,” he said, “It was always magical to me.”

Stories are contagious.  From one man’s story another emerges.  And another, and another and another until the white, sterile, table disappears and for a moment we are sitting around a campfire as one, no longer defined by our race, label or position.  Through honesty, stories and laughter they have become a “we”.

No mater how many times I see it, it is always magical to me.