I went to a camp meeting last weekend to help out. The conference has asked all the pastors to attend at least one summer camp in order to help and support the organisers so I chose this one - a weekend for girls aged 8-11. A peculiar age it is, to say the least... I was dead tired after three days.

When I arrived I realised the main reason I wanted to go there wasn't so much the camp itself but rather the place (embarrassing, I know). The camp meeting took place in Rakvere, a town where I spent most of my teenage years so it was a lot like a home-coming. What I didn't anticipate but what happened was that I drowned in the sea of melancholy as soon as I got there. So every time the girls were busy with something and my assistance wasn't required, I sneaked out and walked down the memory lane. I wandered in the park I used to walk my dog all the time. I walked down the streets where we took our evening strolls with mom. I sat in the cemetery where my grandparents are resting. I sat on the stairs of my old home. I missed seeing my grandpa sitting in the pew he always used to sit in the church. I missed the time when the world was still a safe place. And I couldn't decide whether I should be happy for having had these times and these people (and one dog) in my life or whether I should be devastated because of having lost it all. I still can't decide. And maybe it doesn't matter. Because my heart aches either way.

When I sat in the cemetery talking to, uhmmm, my grandparents tomb stones, I thought about what William Faulkner said in his Absalom, Absalom! which I had just finished. It fit perfectly with my melancholy.

You make so little impression, you see. You get born and you try this and you don't know why only you keep on trying it and you are born at the same time with a lot of people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others all trying and they don't know why either except that the strings are all in one another's way like five or six people all trying to make a rug on the same loom only each one wants to weave his own pattern into the rug; and it can't matter, you know that, or the Ones that set up the loom would have arranged things a little better, and yet it must matter because you keep on trying and then all of a sudden it's all over and all you have left is a block of stone with scratches on it provided there was someone to remember to have the marble scratched and set up or had time to, and it rains on it and then sun shines on it and after a while they don't even remember the name and what the scratches were trying to tell, and it doesn't matter.

Life and death. And it doesn't matter.

I'm listening to songs which go well with such an emotional state. I'm not sure it's helping but I've clicked on this song more than just once these days - James Bay's Hold Back The River.