Community is a Practice

My campsite in Rigby, ID the night before the eclipse. August 2017.

On August 21st, 2017, I woke up in a tent in the middle of a field in Rigby, Idaho. I had paid some farm owners fifty bucks to camp on their empty land so that I could watch the total solar eclipse at 11:33 that morning.

It was the fourth day of a solo road trip that began on my twenty-ninth birthday. I had kicked off the celebration by driving twelve hours from Los Angeles to Zion National Park and crying myself to sleep. From there, I headed north to Salt Lake City, then made my way to Rigby, just north of Idaho Falls.

At this point, in the summer of 2017, I was halfway through what I still consider to be the most challenging year of my life. I had left my marriage, stopped speaking to my mother, and was physically ill to the point of forced social isolation. I was a mess, trudging through the darkness of the tunnel, still far from seeing any light appear at the end.

Solo road trips had become one of my favorite ways of coping with the constant, raging flow of newly-found self-awareness that seemed to be crashing into me in an ongoing series of psychological tidal waves.

After decades of anxiously and neurotically controlling my day-to-day existence, relying on perfectionism and grandiosity to distract and define myself, I had finally let go of the reigns. I no longer knew who I was, or where I was going. Being able to pick any destination on a map, get in the car, and drive, felt empowering and reassuring.

I woke up before sunrise on the morning of the 21st to see that a friend had texted me a link to an interview with Alice Waters. I don’t remember much about the piece other than the very end, where Waters says that she was planning to spend her later years in a “multigenerational commune of her own design.”

Whether it was my state of emotional and physical exhaustion that morning, the heightened meaning and significance I’d given to the eclipse, or the fervency I felt to find my “authentic path” after so many years of being disconnected from myself, this sentence sent chills through my body. I vividly remember saying out loud, still wrapped in my sleeping bag with tears running down my face, “This is it.”

Community was my path.

To be clear, it’s not that the interview with Alice Waters was solely responsible for planting the seed of community within me. There had been many months of meditation, synchronicity, and soul searching that brought me to this moment. However, on the morning of the eclipse, I felt that I was finally given permission to water the seed. (Thank you, Alice.)

Totality. August 21, 2017.

It’s been five and a half years since the eclipse, and while so much has come and gone in my life since then, my desire to cultivate community has only grown stronger. Community remains my greatest passion, and my guiding light.

However, what I’ve come to learn is that envisioning community and actually building community are two very different things.

---

I believe that somewhere within each of us resides an archetypal imprint of community; a shared recollection of tribal belonging that exists in perpetuity.

For some of us, this imprint feels particularly potent, like the memory of a lost loved one, and the grief associated with this loss emerges as an aching hunger — a deep longing to find our way back to something that feels both very far away, yet unmistakably familiar.

The hunger and longing is understandable. We all have a right to community, belonging, and tribe, and we all have a right to the grief that emerges in its absence.

At the core of this grief is our longing to belong. This longing is wired into us by necessity. It assures our safety and our ability to extend out into the world with confidence. This feeling of belonging is rooted in the village and, at times, in extended families. It was in this setting that we emerged as a species. It was in this setting that what we require to become fully human was established. We are designed to receive touch, to hear sounds and words entering our ears that soothe and comfort. We are shaped for closeness and for intimacy with our surroundings. Our profound feelings of lacking something are not reflection of personal failure, but the reflection of a society that has failed to offer us what we were designed to expect.

- Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow

But here’s the thing about hunger and longing. When left unsatisfied, especially for long periods of time, our hungers can expand, flood out, and push away anything that stands between them and satiation.

Our hunger for food and our hunger for love, intimacy and belonging are similar in the sense that all are imperative to our survival. When it comes to love, intimacy, and belonging, most of us are starving. In an effort to acquire what our soul and spirit crave, many of us are willing, whether consciously or unconsciously, to do whatever it takes.

Think back to your state of mind when you fell in love for the first time… didn’t take much, right?

Without any previous firsthand experience, our ideals, projections and fantasies take center stage. Eventually, most of us will learn how to discern between real love and fantasy. Ultimately, we will learn how to balance our hungers with patience and judgment, but this takes time. 

When it comes to community, most of us are falling in love for the very first time. We are drunk with desire and infatuated by possibility. Our internal hunger for belonging, egalitarianism, and reciprocity is drowning out the tangible realities of what these things really mean.

---

A year and a half ago, I left on a trip around the world with the intention of soaking up as much inspiration and direction as I could. I knew that when I returned from this trip I’d likely be moving forward with building community in ways I never had before, namely, by building a lifeboat of sorts in Crestone, CO — a place where friends could come stay while they help out with the garden, or help us build a tea room, or a greenhouse. A place for small gatherings of like minded humans. A place of learning, and sharing, and belonging – a tangible, physical manifestation of something that up until now has only ever existed in the abstract.

“Show me what I need to learn” I said as I boarded the first plane.

A year and a half later, I can definitively report that I had a whole lot to learn.

I’ve returned to the US embarrassed and blushing from humiliation over what I thought I knew.

Ideals ruptured by reality. Naiveté exposed. Wings clipped by Chronos.

So many tears and sleepless nights.

I’ve returned humbled by the lessons, and grateful for the initiation.

“Time clipping Cupid’s Wings” by Pierre Mignard, 1694. Chronos, god of time and earthly limitation clips the wings of Cupid, god of desire, attraction and infatuation.

What I’ve learned, first and foremost, is that community takes time.

Community isn’t something we “master,” or opt in and out of. Community is something we practice.

Community isn’t a five day retreat, or a yoga teacher training. It doesn’t reside in ecological metaphors, and it isn’t buying land with friends. Community isn’t non-monogamy, or regenerative agriculture. It’s not a podcast, a music festival, or a women’s circle.

These may very well be inspirations for community, and perhaps examples of community, but community itself is so much more.

Community is messy and confronting.

It’s not a shield that protects us from getting hurt.

Community is heartbreak, vulnerability, and betrayal. It’s telling someone that they hurt us, and apologizing when we fuck up.

Community requires boundaries, and saying no.

Community means discernment, discretion, and self-protection.

Community is triggering, and demands that we come back to it, even when it hurts. 

Community mirrors everything we might hope to avoid.

Community requires commitment, sacrifice, routine, and ritual.

Community is animate — it’s teachings and lessons continually evolving.

Community is a skill we practice.

Once lost, [community] is difficult to re-member - that is, to bring forth just because community-minded folk want it to be so. It takes a lot of learning, and un-learning. It takes a much deeper commitment than most understand, or are even willing to make … To commit to community is a willingness to participate meaningfully in the lives of others. As well, it’s the willingness to be seen, and to be of real consequence … True community is an organism that reflects a complex web of interdependence that must be constantly nurtured and fiercely defended against all that would poison its spirit.

- Ian Mackenzie

Although the plan to concretize my communal vision continues to evolve, I’m no longer holding on to the same amount of pride and certainty I once was. That said, relinquishing my expectations about how I want this plan to unfold hasn’t been easy, because despite the hurdles I’ve encountered over the past several years, I am still drunk with longing.

So far, the communal skill I’ve needed to practice the most has been confronting my longing’s tendency to provoke drunken lapses in judgment.

Just because we want something doesn’t mean we possess the skills necessary to engage.

Just because something feels familiar doesn’t mean we know what to do with it.

Just because the intention of our longing is pure doesn’t mean we can’t become blinded by our desires.

Community is a practice.

Shifting away from sanguinity doesn’t mean we need to discard our optimism or our passion. Magic can still exist and thrive within the structures and limitations of grounded reality. Boundaries can still be pushed, and creative innovation can still be employed.

However.

We need to get real, and acknowledge that true, lasting community is far less glamorous and Instagram-worthy than what we anticipate it will be.

In order to successfully cultivate togetherness, we need to relinquish our expectations, embrace our inexperience, and confront the grief that fuels our boundless longing.

I know it feels strange to be a novice at something that was such an integral and innate part of our species’ history for hundreds of thousands of years, but denying our lack of knowledge and experience gets us nowhere. If we truly want to relearn the skills our ancestors possessed and passed on for generations, we first need to acknowledge our ineptitude.

I will be the first to admit to my ignorance and I hope you will join me in doing the same.

Let us encourage each other to proceed with the innocent curiosity of a beginner’s mind.

Let us hold each other accountable to learning from our mistakes.

Let us continually turn to one another, and to the land, and ask to be shown whatever it is we still need to learn.

Let us grieve the losses collectively.

Let us practice, together, again and again.