Day 92
Community
This is a loaded word for me. Like “family” it seems to be something we both choose and do not choose. It is a word used loosely, tossed around like a bean bag, dropped, splitting, beans everywhere.
I suspect that at the heart of this word, if it could speak for itself, community would be one of the most complicated words we encounter. A concept that encompasses people you don’t even know as well as those people that you are closest to.
Community might say that, like love, it is more of a verb than a noun. It is something enacted, something always on the verge of becoming, something that is at the heart of creative process more than at the beginning or end of it.
It might be less manageable than we imagine, less organized, less aligned with individual ideas and worldviews. Community might be more of thing that we wrestle with than a thing that we manifest. Already there, community is what is happening in a place where you feel you don’t fit in. In that case, it might be a community that is wrestling hard for control, wanting to create a space that you are not welcome in. Community can also happen in a way that draws you toward others, that enfolds you, so that you wake up one day holding hands with people you do not know, but hold you nonetheless.
Our most intimate relationships are just microcosms of community. Marriage is perhaps a conscious engagement with the concept of ever forming and developing community. In these spaces we consciously and unconsciously participate in the evolution of something that we are just a piece of, but without which we cannot be entirely whole. In these contexts, love itself is manifested by the practice of community between two individuals.
Rather than trying to force the creation of communities that align with our ideals and ideological positions, perhaps we could open ourselves to the idea that we are already part of many intersecting communities. Not just with people we agree with or love, but with the people who share our roads, our post offices, our favorite books, our questions. The planet is small in the context of the cosmos, and truly, from space there is but one community. It includes all beings held in the atmosphere of earth. Under that blanket we are one community of life.
This is a lot to speak of, but it is no less true for that. Let go of the belief that we can create and manage communities that reflect our fear of what is too big to take in. Embrace the community that you are already creating, and that is creating you. Engage in love, as if you are a part of something without which you cannot be made whole.
