Calling (ugh) on (ugh) the village (UGH)
There is a tragic story in my family that has a silver lining worth exploring.
I’ll give you a sanitized version …
As you may know, before we came to America at the turn of the 19th Century, my Kanes famously lead the village of the Great Blasket Island, the largest of a cluster of rugged rural islands on Ireland’s westernmost shore.
Most families lived in a village on the Great Blasket, while the other islands were traditionally used to graze sheep and hunt bird eggs, however, one of my great+ aunts and her family posted up on Inishtooskert, known locally as An Fear Marbh, or “the Dead Man” for its ominous profile as seen from the mainland.
Inishtooskert
There, they had all that they needed to survive in fish, fowl, and rabbits, with no one near enough to bicker or compete with. It’s described as a happy peasant life by the ethnographers and linguists who came to study their waning way of life.
That is until, an epic storm came upon the coast.
For several WEEKS, passage between the islands was made impossible by tidal waves too strong for their hand-built boats, and it was during that period that my grand+ uncle died in the little cave they called home.
His wife waited as long as she could for rescue, keeping his body covered while she did her best to feed the children on whatever was in reach among the ripping winds. But eventually, his un-waked corpse began to stink, and she, having just given birth, was too weak to drag him above ground. Woefully, this woman was forced to gradually dismember her husband by candlelight while the children slept.
When the storm passed, other Kanes from the Great island immediately rowed over to check on our relations, and of course were dumbstruck by what they found.
The body was dealt with, and the survivors brought over to the village. It’s unclear whether the widow ever recovered her senses, as she understandably went mad from the whole ordeal. But what’s certain is that she and her children were cared for until they too met the end of life, with no complaint from their cousins or neighbors.
I think of this story often, how striking out on our own can be a brilliant ideal until suddenly, circumstances change — tragedy strikes, pressure is applied, and then we are f*cked without fellowship.
In a way my life has been a quest to replace the sense of community I felt promised while growing up Mormon. That aspect of the church always appealed to me — checking on each other, commiserating together, offering what we have to meet each other’s needs.
I never meant to alienate myself by going countercultural when I left the church — in fact the whole idea was to seek a more inclusive, less dogmatic expression of the “Zion” I was raised to build in Christ’s name. But ironically, my efforts — to transcend the nuclear family, to share authentically about my psychonautical explorations, to travel the world collecting wisdom about sustainable communion — left me relatively unrooted while wrapped in a banner of conventional red flags.
And then came the storm.
For me it started with motherhood.
My husband and I had both lost our jobs while I was pregnant, so we had no meal train, no office or campus to pop into, and no one checking on us. He was raised without religion and I was not yet healed enough from my spiritual traumas to seriously consider seeking church. To make matters worse, we moved across the country when our kiddo was still on the tit.
Our practice of ethical non-monogamy, which we’d later describe quite publicly in national press, was, in my mind an open invitation for connection — a “Hey, you can even fall in love with my husband! I’m that willing to share all my blessings!” kinda vibe. But of course I see now how and why it played to the uninitiated as a liability — what couples want to get close to people who might inadvertently steal their spouse away? Again, never our intention, but I understand the aversion.
When Quarantine hit, we were in a rocky place for other reasons, and Fate had its fun tripping plan after plan to hold space and hunker down as neighbors and friends. Basically, I had a hell of a “Yellow Wallpaper” experience that ultimately undid my marriage, and the years that followed have left me feeling like a shuddering widow with no one rowing over to pull me out of the cave.
Dramatic, I know, and in a way sacrilegious to compare the two devastations.
But it’s all to say that I’m realizing I no longer live on the Blaskets, and the village I need isn’t build around a well the way it used to be. I have to, as the adage says, CALL upon my village, and see where it may emerge from the mists…
Thing is, when you’re an absolute wreck this is really hard to do.
And I have been an absolute wreck [taps Absolute Wreck badge on her Girl Scouts sash], BUT I’m also a giddy underdog.
So SLOWLY (or, what feels like slowly — likely I’ll look back and see how resilient I’ve actually been), I’ve begun to rebuild faith that my village will show up, despite the failures of trust coloring my years in Texas.
But it’s been a real mental block, evidenced by my sluggishness to promote our Launch event.
Posting? Tagging? Boosting? Ick. It’s hard to be vulnerable.
It’s hard to stay excited about the notion of families feeling connected to each other outside of legal ties and mutual necessity. But I’m keeping at it, because I really believe in it. I really believe community is a sphere of selfhood organic to the human experience, something we must nourish the way we nourish our physical bones. That belief is in my blood. It’s why I was given these stories to share.
It’s why, even as I’m not sure how long I can hang onto my house as a single mom in a gentrifying urban neighborhood, I continue to open my home.
So with that — I’m excited to see who turns up on 10/21!
