Page 126 - ECOlogic Book

The Scar Clan
(Winter, 1998)

The Longing for Community
Everyone has a deep yearning to go home to a half-remembered, half-
envisioned place we have never been,” a place where “. . . there are people
to whom we can speak without having the words catch in our throats;”
where, as Starhawk describes it, “. . . a circle of hands will open to receive
us, eyes will light up as we enter, voices will celebrate with us whenever we
come into our own power.” 143

This is what we yearn for, an idealized vision of what community is. We who
have een struggling to achieve it know how hard it is. Issues of power come
up, disappointments sour our enthusiasm; unfulfilled expectations threaten
to rip us apart. We think our community must be flawed in some way.
There must be a place where these things don’t happen – where animosities,
misunderstandings, eroded trust do not exist. We think the Starhawk
dream-community must exist somewhere and we’ve somehow missed the
boat – it’s anywhere but here. It’s not only the prevailing culture that is
“dispirited, alienated, and cold.” Often we find it right here, in this very
place where we thought we’d be safe.

We go to the workshops. We read the books. But this thing called
“community” continues to elude us. We keep asking “How do you build
community? What is community?” Paul Nelson, reflecting on this question,
advises: “The first place to start . . . is right here, in this moment with these
people.” 144

Nelson elaborates that community requires two things: witnessing, and
putting relationships in a larger context. To these, I would add a third:
putting aside our illusions of a perfect world. As long as we imagine
ourselves to be “special” or somehow immune to the fallacies of the culture
we’re embedded in, we will continue to experience the ebbs and flows in our
communities as a grating dissonance.

143 Starhawk, quoted in “living by Life,” Jim Dodge, inHome: a Bioregional Reader, I’an Andrus, Plant, &
Wright, eds., (New Society Publishers, Philadelphia, PA, 1990).

144 Nelson, Paul, “Keepers of the Law: On Becoming Elders,” Fall, 1997 Earthlight Magazine.

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