What makes a Satori Camper? By Caya Berndt.

A 15-year old musical prodigy. A bobbed pixie of a girl with a penchant for neuroscience. A boy who can pull poems out of thin air. A dancer. A voracious reader and an abstract artist.

This is but a sampling of the variety of students that run, shuffle and prance through Satori's halls, and already it scales a mountainside of interests and backgrounds. Yet even so, it's only a small blip on the map of the individual who attends this camp. Some are lonely, seeking companionship from the like-minded. Others still revel in the ravenous intellectuality that others fret over. Satori provides an environment that is, quite frankly, not your average public school--exactly why you'll see no cookie cutters here.

So what's the story behind Satori? What does it mean to be a Satoriite? What is it that unites us all?
One turns to the very subtitle: "Satori Camp: for Gifted and Talented Junior and Senior High Schoolers." Loaded terms, but they beg the question: what does it mean to be "gifted," and what does it have to do with Satoriites?

While the term "gifted" often conjures images of mini-Mozarts pounding out symphonies and prepubescent Jeopardy finalists, for many of the campers, being gifted means nothing more than the ability to see things differently.

Ryan Edie described it as "looking at a tree and thinking both 'tree' and 'complex carbon organism.'"

"I think everybody is a genius," said Lisa Miller, a fourth-year camper at Satori. 

"If you judge a fish by it's ability to climb a tree, it's gonna [sic] live its whole life thinking it's stupid. I guess we just got lucky," Miller said.

But it isn't just being "gifted" that unites the students of Satori. Some, such as first year camper, Jacob Towne, feel that only "others think I am [gifted.]" Some do admit to being "gifted," but it's with a shrug of the shoulders, as if it was an everyday thing. It would seem that though the camp describes itself as a haven for the gifted, being recognized as such isn't what the students are all about.

What unites Satori? Even among the students the answer is unclear. Many think the "camaraderie" is what attracts potential students, while others believe the very rhyme-less and reasonless nature of the student body is all the unity the camp needs. After all, who else would want to spend their summer, the escape from school, at a college campus studying neuroscience and ethics for two hours, three times a day? What unites Satori?

Examining the student body calls to mind the necessity of a gifted label. In a typical high school environment, and even in the outside world, the ability to see things differently can lead to a person being ostracized, or even painfully rejected in the community. More than one camper has surely felt the pain of falling grades when presenting a complex carbon organism to a teacher looking for a description of a tree. It's not that society hates those that are different--on the contrary, it's the very difference or "giftedness" among the public that enables society to evolve. That doesn't make it any easier for a teen who wants nothing more than somewhere to belong.

One need not be burdened beneath the label of "gifted" here--at Satori, to be gifted is to be normal.
Acceptance is exactly what Satori offers to its students. In the end, that's what anyone wants, whether they are gifted, or otherwise.

Maybe nothing unites us. Maybe the diversity is the purest expression of what it means to be united. Prodigy? Amateur musician? Lover of learning? Lover of people? As long as you have an open mind, welcome aboard.

Perhaps 2nd year Will Petro said it best: "I don't believe anything unites us all. I think we're just 

accepting of what's different."

An open mind is gift enough. If that is so, then united we stand.