01/07/2023
Our Final night of camp. Our burn bag ceremony. All week our campers engage in cabin family conversations about the importance of letting things go that continue to weigh us down. So we can heal and overcome. It may be a memory or situation. All week, campers and counselors write down things they choose to let go and burn. They put it in the bag and the final night we let it burn. A journalist was there to witness and these are his words:
The fiery gray snowflake rose a dozen feet above the blazing fire that birthed it.
Moments before it was part of a burn bag. Now it fights gravity on its journey to the ground.
This is the ash from which the 80 campers of Camp Phoenix 2023 will rise.
Earlier today, young boys and girls alike inscribed details of their respective traumatic experiences on slips of paper that were placed in bags designed to change the color of the fire as proof of their own growth.
Then came the fiery purge – a symbolic act of bravery, not to erase or hide from the past, but to incinerate the mental barriers holding them back from the healing they deserve.
“Burning helps make a new path,” said Sophie, 9. “It showed me not to be scared. Don’t be afraid to show people who you are.”
The burn bag ritual was designed as the centerpiece of camp’s final night when Camp Director Rebecca Bouras launched Camp Phoenix in 2020 to serve children by equipping them with skills necessary to understand, heal and rise beyond their traumas.
“It symbolizes processing the thing that weighs them down, letting go, and looking forward, not back,” explained Rebecca, a Licensed Professional Counselor, who works as a school counselor for East Hall Middle School in Hall County. “They find out there’s more than where they’re at. They see that there’s hope for the future.”
Before the burn bags were tossed in the fire by each cabin representative, Camp Co-Director Kaye Oesterle gave a charge of encouragement to the campers and counselors gathered in the amphitheater at Camp Twin Lakes’ Will-A-Way campus in Winder.
“The ceremony is very special in that we get to let go of our trials, hardships, hurt, pain, abuse, anything that we have chosen to release,” Kaye said to the group. “Inside your bags are mere pieces of paper, but the words written on those bags have come from a place that no one knows but you. As these bags burn, take a deep breath. Say goodbye. And rest in the knowledge that you have triumphs over tragedy.”
As the bags burned, tears streamed down faces, burdens began to lift, and hearts became less wounded.
For 15 minutes in the wake of the ritual, as the now green-and-orange fire died down, there were hugs and love and compassion in every direction: camper-to-camper, counselor-to-camper, and dozens of campers to Rebecca, including 13-year-old Emma.
“I can finally let go of it,” she said of her trauma through soft tears and a hopeful smile.
