to Amy Webb
I wrote this letter to my mother in 2024, sitting alone in the balcony of a hostel, juggling how much of what I understand as me and my life is a creation by me vs how much of me is someone else's creation. its one of my favorite avenues to take my mind. are we the creator or the creation? This reminds me that the most beautiful questions usually don't provide definitive answers. It's in the gray that I often feel the miraculous.
Anyways, Its late summer, in a little town called Santa Marta on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, about two months into a backpacking trip through this country. At this point, I had gone pretty far looking for something—wasn't always sure what. I thought maybe it was freedom, maybe God, maybe some deeper understanding of what it means to be alive. I had always been drawn to the moments that felt spiritual: the silence, the awe, the captivating mystery of psychedelic plants. But that afternoon, sitting in that particular solitude, I started to understand something that has taken me years to see. Maybe the highest form of this spirituality isn't found in some extraordinary experience at all. Maybe it is found in how deeply we love the people we have been given. Maybe the work is not ascending, but remembering. Remembering who has loved us, who shaped us, and how lucky we are to love them back.
It was after two weeks alone traveling in and around this town that I wrote this - I modified the language a bit to fit her lens of seeing the world, but it wasn't difficult, christianity is my mother tongue, and this is what love does.
Mom,
I am sitting in my hostel in Santa Marta. It is still hard to make friends, and it has left me a bit more isolated than I anticipated.
But Solitude, and the silence that comes with it—if I can lean into the uncomfortableness, always makes the space between heaven and earth feel a little more ambiguous. It is my favorite feeling.
Despite how hard it is at first, I wholeheartedly believe in the power of sitting still somewhere and just listening to the silence.
Mother Teresa once said:
“The fruit of silence is prayer, the fruit of prayer is faith, the fruit of faith is love, the fruit of love is service, the fruit of service is peace.”
The silence asks me what kind of life I want to move into. What do I have to give to the world? It asks me to hold everything inside me with an unprecedented amount of grace. Most importantly, it questions what really is closest to my heart.
This is where I find myself today, writing this to you.
I heard this quote a long time ago that has always stuck with me:
“Our lives are God's gift to us. What we do with them is our gift to God.”
This resurfaced when I met a Filipino man on my first day on a free walking tour of Medellin that I jumped in on. His name was Milo. We ended up getting lunch after and talking about the moments when we have felt the divine, what freedom means to us, and ended up on unconditional love.
It was a beautiful conversation with a man who was three decades older than me, from the other side of the world, that I met 3 hours prior. In that moment, there were no walls of separation. Another one of my favorite feelings.
He mentioned living in Thailand, where he studied under a monk for a couple of years, and he said something so simple that brought this quote back to me.
He said his teacher simply repeated to him:
“Our lives are our creation.”
I don't know why it hit me so hard.
The experience I am living through right now, what I call my life, is my creation.
I kept thinking about it.
What I have looked at. The things I have listened to in my headphones. The people I have chosen to trust. The times I have said yes and the times I have said no. The things I have spent my money on and the things that I haven't. The things that I have put on my camper walls and the things I have put in my body.
The people I have given my love to, and have let myself be loved by.
Even the inner world—the ideas I have entertained, the questions I have persisted in trying to find the answers to, the prayers I have kept praying.
My responses to not just good feelings, but maybe more importantly, what I do with feelings of loneliness, regret, abandonment, or fear.
All of it.
All of it.
A life, truly, is a work of art.
What I have found is that what I want more than anything for myself is to make a beautiful creation with what I have been given.
In my mind, I have to ask myself then: What is beauty to me?
This is where I move closer to God.
Mom, I am beginning to understand..
If I look at my life as a testament to what I really believe, what I really hold closest to my heart, and I am honest enough with myself, I can tell you what I have deemed truly beautiful—the paint strokes I have made to create a conglomeration that I would call beautiful.
Helping kids grow up.
Remaining a student.
Dancing in my camper when no one is watching.
Laughing.
Trusting the unknown.
Holding space for another person without judgment.
Writing. Listening. Nature. Searching. Traveling.
In pursuit of proof - that despite what the news says about the world - it is good, I belong here, and there is no direction I can turn where God is not.
How deep can we go into our own heart?
What shapes a life?
The question seems to keep going as far as I am willing to walk with it.
What I think about myself, How capable I believe I am, What stories I tell myself about people and the world and my place in the midst of so much, What I tell myself about the way I look, and the behaviors I let become habits, that make a character, that shape a destiny.
Being asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, Jesus answered them:
“The kingdom of God is not coming in ways that can be observed, nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There!’ for behold, the kingdom of God is in the midst of you.”
Luke 17:20
Every time I play with these thoughts, I remember my starting point:
“Our lives are God's gift to us. What we do with them is our gift to God.”
And it is in this—in thinking about what I have been given—that tears come to my eyes.
It is here that I find myself arrived, on earth, and at the same time at the feet of the Most High, bowing in gratitude.
It is here, every time, that I think of you.
Because you see, Mom, I have been given everything.
I have been given the ultimate gift: the chance to get to be a part of the dance of all creation.
I have been given this way of thinking. I have been passed down this confidence. I have been handed this open heart.
With your creation, you have made it so I may get to experience it all too.
You gave me the experience of walking into the Magic Kingdom as a ten-year-old. The chance to take a bus on a Young Life trip to Colorado and fall in love for the first time. The feelings of joy and adventure and thrill. you gave me the understanding that there is no end to learning. That I can do anything I set my mind to. That it is okay to cry and to feel my emotions. You gave me the very lens to see this world as an adventure to be lived.
Even just the chance to get to sit here on the coast of Colombia, feel the warm Caribbean air, reflect on the things that I hold closest to my heart, and find that there is nothing closer than my relationship with you.
One of the greatest gifts of my adult life has been getting to know you all over again.
I have so much respect and admiration for the way you have created your life, and what you continue to make with the blank canvas before you, with what you have been given.
Most of all, you have shown me the greatest love that my eyes have ever seen.
Such love that crosses the veil, revealing the kingdom of God amongst us, here and now—the love you have freely given to me.
We are all held in such tender hands. This I know to be true.
Thank you for holding me so tenderly in yours.
I love you, Mom.
—Cam