Creating Community

Togetherness, sharing, connection, saving the world, nourishing ourselves... community. Brainstorm here!

Mom and I had The Conversation today about the rest of my life. And i was trying to explain why i was so possibly seriouse about Cob Castle. I asked mom "is there anything in the universe more worth doing then loveing people?" and she didnt know what to say. Dawn

A thought and i dont know where else to stick it, so here it is. Today at like 2 pm on a sunny afternoon in June while i was sitting there solving equations and listening to good music, i realized something. All at once. I am going to miss this place. this...home? Even my "family".(for those of you who dont know, i just moved after my family broke up and have all sorts of "issues" around home family etc)I cried over my textbook not because i was sad but because i knew what i had and why i would miss it one day. Maybe it was just growing up.

Home is such a freaking complicated idea, its really rather twisted. What is worse, having a home and loseing it or never having one at all? (like asking, what is worse, to never love people, or to love them and then lose them?) Dawn

Tis' better to have loved and lost[0], than never to have loved at all. I believe that. Definitly. Amen, sister. For so many reasons. 1) Life is change, good to get practice living with that. 2) Studies have proven that soldiers who had had warm, loving families were usually better able to deal with the extreme emotional, physical and moral challenges of battle, contrary to the perhaps common assumption that kids raised hard would be tougher....[1] 3) if you know what you're missing, maybe it's easier to find it again. -reanna
i find it hard to see home toren up and turned around from what it used to be. i hate how it feels to have everything go different. but i do know that it is nice to have things change. i just rather they change in a peaceful way. those are just my random thoughts, somehow connected to this subject. feel free to move them to where they seem more appropriate. -Mari

my "home situation" has been a bit screwy for a while. not in a bad sort of way, really... just different. I'll be seventeen this month, and it's my last year living with my parents. but I'm not really mentally "at home". school-wise, I might as well be in college... I'm taking 11 hours of classes (just one hour short of full-time) at the university here, and all of my friends here are in college. I'm working, too... and applying for "regular" college (for next fall). but I'm still living with my family, and so I've got this curfew thing. it's a bit frustrating... to be responsible enough to be juggling school and work and all of the "extracurricular" things I do (percussion ensemble, an underground newspaper, LARP, running my websites, etc) and a social life, and yet still have to be in the house by 10 on weeknights, and 11 or 12 on weekends. and it's not that my parents don't trust me, it's that they worry. but it seems a bit weird to me that they're also ok with sending me off to college, hopefully in iowa, next year... and letting me go and do all of this stuff they're not ok with this year.

~becca~

I finished reading a book called "Ice Bound" last week. It's about a doctor who gets breast cancer at the South Pole. There's a big group that 'winters-over' there every year, and they basically keep each other alive for quite a large chunck of time (they can't get anyone in or out during the polar winter- planes can't fly in). What I noticed was that they were really close to each other, really attached to one another. They had a whole little community of 'Polies' who have experienced the same thing together. It got me thinking about community and how it functions succesfully.

I think that people would do better in a small community or tribal setting than in the type of setting we have today. The Polies bonded to each other and were so open, I think, because they had to be to survive. They depended on each other.

I think that's something to strive for- I want to be living like that, with other people, everyone doing what they love to support everyone else.

I conjured up a dream about a little community after I read that book. There was a large tract of acreage with fields and such on it, and there was non-permanant but liveable housing in various locations. People would come and stay for as long as they wished, doing whatever they did best. The animal lovers would work with livestock and pets, people who liked gardening would grow everyone's food, people who liked taking tinkering with machines and electronics would fix whatever broke. Everyone contributed to the community in their own way, and because that would be what they enjoyed doing, no one would have to gripe about not liking their job. We would be living together and enjoying it, and it would work because we would depend on each other to survive and we would respect each other's views (no one's opinion would be more valid than anyone else's).

It's a nice dream, but I'm not sure how realistic it is. It assumes people are perfect, and that isn't true. There would probably be fights which would make it difficult to live there. There would be the question of money- if the community isn't totally self-sufficient, then a source of income would be needed. That brings up the question of how we'd get the income, and who works to get it and how much, and all of that. I'd love to make it a reality, but I don't know if it's possible. *sigh*

-Katherine

Quo Vadis is here:

http://www.quovadis-gathering.org

[0] I was so tempted to spell it "lossed," I wonder why...

[1] Hey Reanna, where did you read that?? I remember it very clearly being in "Education and Ecstasy," which I read several years ago, but I didn't get a reference for it (if indeed there was one). Julie(lipse

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