Community isn’t “created”

The central question of the HH experiment is, how do we cultivate a sense of village in a postmodern world?

I chose the word “village” instead of “community” because I wanted to ground that concept in the literal ground — as in, how can we feel a living kinship with our daily neighbors, the people with whom we share elemental realities like water and air?

It’s an ecological query.

Because, connections can of course be found through mutual passion or shared concerns, and those connections can indeed spark and grow online — but I believe that definition downplays the somatic dimension of community (literally, sharing common space) to a dangerous degree…

It dissociates our sense of kinship from the relevance and sacredness of planetary life and falsely suggests we can find the depth of what we naturally crave by cherry-picking the people we have to deal with — and, is that really “community”, or is that just more subdivision?

Those ideological & theme-based hubs have their place, of course. Where would I be (or WHO would I be) without my little nests of francophones, knitting circles, and stand-up circuits? I’d be a husk, and that doesn’t bring a lot to any table.

But, the older I get, the more I see how the real spiritual challenge of community is not to filter out everyone who’s agitating (though safeguarding by gatekeeping IS a part of leading the village — I’ve found out the hard way!), but to learn how to synchronize with people we’re not drawn to, or who push our buttons, simply because we are tasked with tending the same space together.

This is why I’m saying that now I believe we don’t “create” community — though we can create opportunities for intimacy within it, and that’s what we endeavor to do here at HH — actually, we surrender to community,

The village creates itself when land is fertile, accessible, and appealing. We could say the Spirit of the land elects to draw us in. There, truly, it is our mutual need for each other that stimulations communion. Now that we’ve outsourced so much labor and security to privatized or external forces, that impulse is indeed weak.

There’s a lack of perceptible interdependence, not to mention accountability — and without the need to stay engaged and on good terms, it’s all too easy to become islands, where communing is optional and based on preferences rather than a primal source of gratitude.

So this is what I’m working on now, surrendering to community — to my real-life neighbors, even though we don’t have every interest in common, or every perspective aligned. We’re at different stages of life, and those lives are mostly busy. But communion is something I need in my life, and I know I’m not alone.