Yasmina's Story- I Don't Know Any Greater Magic Than WinGate

No words exist to account fully for what Wingate has done for me, and for the lives of so many that I had the opportunity to love there. I was twenty years old when I first began at Wingate as a new field staff trainee, nervous and completely unexpecting of what was to come. The only thing I knew was that my brother had attended a different wilderness therapy program years earlier in high school, and that he would never speak of it with me against my insistent prying. For half of a decade, I floated through life with the low, chronic hum of curiosity about just what kind of things happened in that kind of a place. Three years later, I found myself an entirely different version of the young woman who first stepped foot in the desert. The land had become more than any feeling of home to me. The experiences were more potent, present-jerking, and profound than any possible manufactured conjuring of flesh or imagination ever before or since. That earnest philosophy, the one I witnessed afford peace to so many hurt individuals and broken relationships, shed a kind of light more penetrable than any brightness of the sun. Those precious friends, mentors, and Willow-walkers generated a love from me more exceptional than I could have ever dreamt possible. It became clear to me why my brother never shared his story of wilderness therapy. No words exist to make someone understand who wasn't there. It would be like trying to explain magic. There's just something special about living primitively in a community that's got you, and I mean really got you, no matter what. Something about having all that space to unchain your spirit. To laugh, scream, cry, and gain a genuine access to a deep sense of authenticity that can only be found free from civilization's binding context. And to be held, loved through it all. It's an experience that grows into you like the weave of a basket, makes you feel whole enough to heal, to rediscover the joy, peace, and safety once wrenched from the grasp of your innocence. It's a space for spontaneous evolution, catalyzed by the emergent sense of newfound purpose. A place to wholly embody being, as all things do in nature. Wingate may have been the most meaningful time of my life. Still, I don't know if I could really, truly explain what it was to me. I can't. But, here's a fact: There are kids out there right now in this world still breathing who would not be had it not been for the heart, spirit, sweat, and dirt that was Wingate. Real kids. I don't know any greater magic than that.