Applicantion to Friends of Camphill, India

I think I lost my ability to appreciate the simple pleasures of life when I moved to New York City – how ironic that it was precisely this this move that led me to rediscover them. I was born in Ashford, England into a family of Russian Jewish immigrants who had spread across the Western World like pool balls scattering across a table when Stalin came into power. The majority of my close family lived in my vicinity during my early childhood, but the rest of my family tree was mostly located in America (I also have some distant relatives located throughout the Baltic States and Poland) and so we would usually visit during the summer months. I was a single child, and as most single children do, I learned to entertain myself with the simple pleasures that my life had to offer me – mildewed sticks became Excalibur, gleaming under the son in my mother’s garden, and I often found myself lost for hours in the fantasy worlds hidden within the pages of my father’s beaten novels. My bed alternated between being a spaceship and a submarine where my plush crocodile Croccy and I would spend the night fighting off aliens and giant sharks. I was a connoisseur of simple pleasure, I found entertainment in almost every part of the world around me.

When I was nine, my mother and I moved from Canterbury, England to Ellensburg, a small desert town in the centre of Washington State. The town was small, conservative and hot – the type of place where dust-devils whirl across rusty train tracks and abandoned factories. I remember my cousin Shane and I hopping over gnarled barbed-wire fences and exploring the dumping grounds behind our local supermarket, wading through mountains of local newspapers which had been discarded until one of the truck drivers there found us and called our mothers. Mostly, though, I didn’t like Ellensburg. School was incredibly tedious and my outlook on life didn’t exactly mesh well with the sports- focused, hyper-patriotic views of my classmates. During this period in my life, I found myself reading more than ever and this became pretty much the only aspect of school I excelled in.  For this, along with my British accent, I was often mocked, and found myself allotted to my school’s group of misfits.  We looked exactly like you are probably picturing us – a group of awkward, prepubescent, chubby boys with odd twitches, hobbies and mannerisms of speech. We spent our lunches hiding in the library and playing cards and often had our books smacked out of our hands in the hallways. A key component to our band of outcasts was Delfino.

Delfino was the first mentally disabled person I ever had close contact with and I can’t say that I or  any of my friends dealt with it well.  Because of his less academic nature, Delfino had been held back two years in school and though he was physically the ablest out of all of us, with a sparse strip of black fluff on his upper lip and thick armpit hair which my friends and I marveled at in horror, Delfino was possibly the friendliest person I have ever met in my life.  In general he liked three things: pizza bites, playing with his friends and dinosaurs. Although our hormone-driven minds found it easy to make Delfino cry, he always showed much deeper emotional maturity than us when it came to compassion. If you had forgotten your packed-lunch, Delfino would give you half of his pizza bites.  If you tripped and tweaked your ankle, Delfino would pat you on the back all the way to the nurse’s office. As children we couldn’t see how precious his friendship was, and we teased him in a strange mimicry or how we were treated by other children in school. During this time, as I think happens with most people, my perception of the world began to shift along with the way I acted around other people. Imaginary monsters which were easily eviscerated by a wooden sword in the confines of my bedroom moved in and set up shop in the real world, hiding beneath human skin and staring out at me malevolently. I became less trusting and far angrier than I had ever been before. Whilst I still allowed my life to be enriched by my imagination, I often found myself peddling water in the wake of that hulking whale boredom, and sometimes I wonder if my unkindness towards Delfino was a product of a profound jealousy that I could no longer see the world in the magical way that Delfino effortlessly rendered.  I still remember he and I tearing up my garden with toy shovels and our bare hands (to my mother’s dismay) under the hot desert sun and I remember how I marveled at the conviction with which Delfino hacked away at the dirt, thoroughly convinced that we would find the bones of some undiscovered dinosaur hiding beneath my driveway. To this day it is one of my greatest regrets that I couldn’t then take the joy I do now from his fantasies.

A symphony of flashing lights towering all around you, little windows into mystery lives organized into a perfect rectangular fashion like some kind of infinitely complex code standing between you and a precipice of nothingness. A thousand eye-poppingly massive screens winning the battle against the night and pumping media into your bloodstream like a gargantuan digital heart in the sky. An exquisite painting of concussive sound: metal squealing like a flaming horse as a train screams into the station, tires screeching and men shouting obscenities at each other in the middle of the street as a mad woman sprints around in circles, spitting on people and shouting about cabbages, the patter of a sudden downpour upon a thousand umbrellas which bump into each other on the street below like multi-coloured lily pads on the surface of a pond. An inscrutably produced performance of smell: the delicious timbre of roasted peanuts wafting through the air and mingling in an alien ballet with the pungent scent of urine galumphing up the steps from the subway, the scent of a woman’s perfume shouting uselessly over the high pitched drone of vomit on the train and a man’s halal street food as he gorges himself on the way to work.  Constant sensory overload. If boredom was my sickness, New York City was my cure.  

I moved to New York when I was 12 years old, finishing off my middle-school career at a performing arts school in Brooklyn before being accepted into the Rudolf Steiner school of Manhattan. New York City was the perfect place for me to shed my introversion and focus all of my attention on the slew of pleasures the city without sleep has to offer.  As I grew older I became less and less concerned with the problems of good and evil and more focused on providing myself with every type of enjoyable experience imaginable.  Like most teenagers, I was incredibly self-absorbed, constantly changing the way I dressed and how I presented myself, catapulting myself through a roster of friendships in a flaming halo of drama. Not that this is necessarily all bad – I will always remember my teenage years in New York with great fondness. The delicious anxiety of my first forbidden beer in a friend’s basement, or the heart-fluttering excitement of my first kiss are experiences I wouldn’t give up for the world.

At the time, I remember deeply enjoying the level of artistic freedom and expression the Steiner curriculum gave me, but I also remember being highly critical of it. Steiner was certainly an advocate for how much pleasure one can take from nature and working for the good of one’s community, but I far preferred New York’s clogged cement landscape to the natural world and in a community so sprawling and diverse the idea of working for its betterment seemed unrealistic. By the time I was sixteen I was fully immersed in New York and its culture of adolescents, spending every night I possibly could out on dates or partying with my friends, going to the cinema and busily tapping away at my various social media platforms whenever I was alone.

Then, for my Parzival main lesson in eleventh grade, when I was sixteen, my class went to work at Camp Hill for a week.  I still remember my chagrin at the idea: our tenth grade trip had also involved working on a farm, and usually when I worked I expected money as compensation. Plus, I wanted to be a professional writer, how was working with mentally handicapped people going to help me achieve my goals? How incredibly wrong I was. I’ve worked in the best kind of place and the worst kind of place (save sweatshops, of course, those modern day slave camps) and the difference is stunning. I will never forget how the fresh air hissing through the trees and over the fields slowly worked its way into my system and lifted me. The labour became easy and often enjoyable, and I found myself taking massive amounts of pleasure in befriending the villagers and knowing that my work was helping them to live happy lives.

That week was a rediscovery of what the simple pleasures of life meant to me: being a working part of a community was truly one of the most fulfilling things I have ever done. What a relief it was to learn how much I enjoyed being helpful!  I now understand what Parzival felt when he learned to ask the right question. I’ve spent two years working on a fish-processing boat on the Bering Sea during the summer season, where the work is an assembly line style automation of humanity’s slow suffocation of our planet. The work there is like the steady hammer of a mallet on metal, beating away at your personality until you are completely one with the massive iron whale that is the ship, faceless and nameless. At the Camp Hill where we worked, everyone was so unique and diverse, working for the betterment of their community – something completely fathomless to Alaskan ship workers. Everyone was concerned about each other and knew each other intimately – a strong contrast to the faceless diversity of New York City. Together my classmates, the villagers and I laughed and worked and shared wisdom every day until the sun was poised to set and we went back to our cabins. Being far older, I was then fully able to grasp the beauty of the incredibly unique way the villagers (mentally disabled adults) minds worked and how beautiful and wise that could be, finally realising how precious of a person Delfino was. I found that the week flew by all too fast, and while I still love my city, i will always miss that feeling of truly working for a good greater than my own. Now that I am spending some time off from school, I’d absolutely live to spend a few months being part of your wonderful community.

Sincerely,

Marlon Labovitch