Mama Says Om - Camping

The theme at Mama Says Om this week is camping. Camps are places where temporary accommodations are set up by lovers of the great outdoors, soldiers, scouts, nomads, pilgrims and travellers. They are structures such as cabins, tents or rough lean-to shelters made out of evergreen branches, and sometimes a camp is nothing more than a place out of the wind and a comfortable sleeping bag. Camping describes the activities related to finding such a place, building one or putting one up and using it - sleeping, eating, rambling or just sitting staring off into the trees, as I have so often found myself doing over the years.

The word camping comes from Old French through archaic Italian and Spanish and thence from the Latin campus or field, but for some reason this morning, I am remembering convent school Latin classes and the expression castra ponere which means "to pitch camp". The memory is a curious thing. We were struggling painfully through Caesar's conquering exploits on the island of Britain when I first encountered the phrase, but a year or two later in another translation class, I encountered the expression in the Latin Vulgate (Numbers 10:31):

Et ille noli inquit nos relinquere tu enim nosti in quibus locis per desertum castra ponere debeamus et eris ductor noster. And he said: Do not leave us, for you know in what places we should pitch camp in the wilderness, and you shall be our guide.

From Caesar's conquering expeditions to the Latin Vulgate, it's about journeying and the wild and magnificent untrammeled places which are now disappearing so rapidly from the earth - it's about wildness and connection. It's about Gaia and her works.

Whether one goes camping with cabin, tent, makeshift shelter or just a sleeping bag out of the wind, there is one thing which is de rigueur, and that is a good roaring campfire after dark. After so many years of camping out, the multitudinous cabins, tents, shelters and sleeping bags of experience have all blurred and run together in my memories, but I remember the campfires clearly and in perfect detail - there is a whole long line of lovely crackling campfires stretching back into my childhood and (hopefully) way off into the future. They are beacons burning brightly on the mountains, mesas and lowlands of my life, and they are happy things to steer by. Marshmallows, anyone?