The Importance of Community in the 21st Century
“The story can’t be about the heroism of one person any more. It has to be about the heroism of communities.”
—Barry Lopez
I consider myself to be an independent person. Someone who has “followed their bliss” as Joseph Campbell put it. “Done my own thing” as we used to say back in the 1960s. And in my adulthood, been self-employed.
Yet, everywhere I have ever lived, I have lived as a part of a community. I didn’t live in isolation. When I was born and lived with my parents in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and even though I don’t remember those toddler years, my little family and I were part of the Kenosha community. When we moved to Memphis, Tennessee—across the then country road from Graceland—and in my gradeschool years, I lived in the Memphis community. When the family moved again to the isolated mountain town of Robbinsville, NC—very near to the Snowbird Cherokee Reservation–in the Southern Appalachian mountains, I was part of the Robbinsville and Cherokee community. When the family moved yet again to Waynesboro in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia for my high-school years, I was part of the Waynesboro community. When I graduated from high-school and attended Furman University for four years in Greenville, SC, and even though I didnt particularly enjoy or relish my experience there during the conservative Southern Baptist Convention years of the college, I was part of the Furman community. I finished college and as an expatriot went to live in France, and there I was part of the French community. I lived part of that time, first in Paris and then in Grenoble and worked at a Catholic monastery there, where I was part of the monastic community and part of the Grenoble community. When I returned back to the states, I lived and worked on a family farm in Fort Wayne, Indiana and was part of the mid-western farming community there. After my farming experience, I moved to California and was living and working in the Napa Valley for a new winery and was part of the Napa Valley wine-making community. When I moved down to the Bay Area to San Francisco, in North Beach, I was part of the North Beach community. When later, I moved and was living up on the San Juan Ridge in the Sierras, I was part of the “Ridge” community. My next move was to Polk County, NC where I lived off-the-grid for four years. Near the town of Saluda, I was part of a rural mountain community. Some years later when I spent summers in Laugharne, Wales writing in the Dylan Thomas Boathouse, I was part of the Welsh community there in Laugharne. And in the last thirty-five years living in Jackson County, NC, I have been part of the Webster/Cullowhee/Tuckasegee/ communities here.
Yes, we are individuals and have, if we are lucky, the freedom to roam and roam how and where we choose. But even so, we don’t live in a vacuum. We lived amongst other people and wild critters and landscapes whether we acknowledge it or not. And each one of those landscapes, those environments, those places, influence and affect where we go, what we do and who we become. In my case, this is certainly true. I am an amalgam of the places and people and natural habitats that I have spent time in and with. I suppose you could say that I am someone with MCD, a multiple-community disorder. But I’d rather think of this as being a multiple-community Order, an MCO, as I feel within myself an ordered harmony and clarity that is the result of having had the experiences I have had along this road I’ve traveled that I call “this life.”
As I near the end of this journey, this “hero’s journey” if I may quote Joseph Campbell again, and I see the predicaments that we humans have unleashed upon the world due to our inattention to the natural world and selfish preoccupations fullfilling our individual desires, I see that Barry Lopez was right and that the only way we are going to get back to any kind of survivable equalibrium or stasis as a race is to build a new, untraveled road into our future. And that road will not be a solo journey seeking survival, but one that is built and traveled upon by whole communities, large and small. It is going to take a universal leap in consciousness, as eco-theologian Thomas Berry stated–a group effort, large and small, to allow us homo-sapiens to have any kind of future here on this garden planet we were so graciously given, called Earth.
In the biblical Gospel of Thomas there is a passage that reads: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” For the past several hundred years (or more) we humans have been following a paved path determined by nation states, corporate and authoritarian governments and the idea of “progress” to our own detriment. We have not been listening to the wisdom voice within, to the moral story within. And that ignoring, that ignorance is rising up, now, to destroy us.
Barry Lopez, the Oregon-based naturalist writer states that rather than referring to our predicament as a ‘problem,’ we need to think of it and address it as a metaphor. He says: “You have to find a metaphor, and when you feel the surge of life, you’re in the right place.We need to reinvent ourselves and our responsiblites to each other, our families, our communities, our countries and our planet. Lopez went on to say: “If we’re going to survive and to thrive in whatever landscape the world offers us in the decades ahead we must learn to speak respectfully to each other, to listen to each other, to take into consideration the fate of each other’s children. We need to ‘Wake up! Wake up and to become awoken to the salvation of a multicultural existence.”
When Barry Lopez was traveling widely across the Arctic in the 1970s and ’80s, he spent a lot of time among Inuit communities, and in each village he would ask people there what adjective they would use to describe white North American culture. The word he heard repeatedly was lonely. “They see us as deeply lonely people,” he said, “and one of the reasons we’re lonely is that we’ve cut ourselves off from the nonhuman world and have called this ‘progress.’ Such numinous encounters in nature are moments of reconnection, part of the human search for reciprocated love.” He further reflects upon this idea and these sentiments.
In my travels to different parts of the world, to Australia where I’ve traveled with Aboriginal people on their lands, in the Canadian High Arctic where I have traveled with the Inuit, I have been repeatedly struck by the same thought: if we are coming into a time of extreme environmental stress, recurring pandemics and of extreme social tensions, why is it that so few people who have actually dealt with these problems are not invited to the table for the discussion? We know why. Here are the questions of race, of cultural superiority, of patriarchy, of educational bias, of religious conviction, that cripple us when our effort is simply to care for our families, our progeny.
To take the customs and cultural wisdom of Native American culture further with regard to the theme of community and multiplicity, we can cite examples of many wisdom keepers on the subject. Onandaga, Iroquois elder Oren Lyons says that “our knowlege is profound and comes from living in one place for untold generations. It comes from watching the sun rise in the east and set in the west from the same place over great sections of time. We are as familiar with the lands, rivers, and great seas that surround us as we are with the faces of our mothers. Indeed, we call the earth Etenoba, our mother, from whence all life springs.” His words are further mirrored by former Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation Wilma Mankiller when she writes in her autobiography, “Cooperation has always been necessary for the survival of tribal people. And even today, working together is more conducive to succcess than competing with one another.” In support of Wilma Mankiller’s wisdom as a legendary leader of her people the Oklahoman newspaper wrote of her: “Wilma Mankiller, the first Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation, helped all Americans understand the need to preserve the basic values of community and stewardship which are central to Native American culture. Above all, through her example she taught us the power of kindness and how to live and die with dignity.”
We can also cite primary passages from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s recent non-fiction best-seller Braiding Sweetgrass for focus and references on “community” and interaction among the plants and animals in the natural world. She gives particular attention to maple trees and how they communicate. Also, she stresses the importance of communication with tribal peoples and the natural world. Finally, none other than feminist, activist and author Gloria Steinem writes: “Native American tribal life through the centuries was far from a primitive way of life. Inner space was as explored by the many as outer space is now expored by the few. The ways of nature and animals, of creating language and art, of healing illness and preserving food, of governing and resolving conficts had already been perfected over millennia.”
Specifically, and maybe more to the eco-psychological point, in his latest novel Henry Mitchell writes in The Winged Child : ”Plants get along much better than people do. They have to, because what we strive for individually, they can only attain in community. Plants know as much as we do, maybe a lot more. They just have their own ways of knowing it. We could learn a lot from them if we could speak the same language. Trees are more connected with their universe than we are. They are not burdened with ego and intellectual constructs. They are not blinded by self-observation. They simply participate in the collective intelligence of all the life inhabiting their place. The intelligent life of a tree, of a forest, of any definable life form, is in the sum of its connections with other life forms.” He goes on to say that we have to “know how to listen apart from words, deeper than emotion, calmer than logic. How to still beneath the storm of rational, linear analysis, to rest in the harmony embedded in all contradiction, to fall into deep awareness of the other until there is no longer any I and Thou, only We. What one thinks of as oneself is just the surface of the life that is there. Knowing, awareness, intention, run deep. Deeper than we can see. Deeper than we can imagine. Deeper than unto ourselves alone, we are.”
Our contemporary wisdom-keepers are everywhere if we are open and attuned to them and are striving to help us to not only know ourselves, but to learn how to live together and in harmony with our identified natural and human communities.
Kairos is an ancient Greek word meaning ‘the right, critical, or opportune moment’. It is one of two words that the ancient Greeks had for ‘time’; the other being chronos. Whereas the latter refers to chronological or sequential time, kairos signifies a proper or opportune time for action. It is now a term being widely used by social scientists and environmental physicists to address the conditions in which we find ourselves living today. In other words, Now is the proper time for action—in this opportune moment when we are told by everyone in the know that if we are going to have a sustainable world in which to live we must make the necessary changes both to ourselves and to everyone around us. Or as Thomas Berry indicates:
The historic mission of our times is to reinvent the human—at teh species level, with critical reflection, within the community of life systems, in a time-developmental context, by means of story, and shared dream experience. We must invent, or reinvent, a sustainable human culture by a descent into our pre-rational, our instinctive resources. Our cultural resources have lost thier integrity. They cannot be trusted. What is needed is not transcendence but ‘inscendence,’ not the brain but the gene.
In other words, we are going to need to, as the Beatles song implies, “Come Together.” A song that rings out today with its more than pertinent title and urgent message (“come together, right now”) “come together” with reciprocated love as Lopez names it, and with “now” meaning today, when there is no time to waste!
—Thomas Rain
Copyright © 2022 by Thomas Rain Crowe. All Rights Reserved. Used with permission.
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