community (soap box!)

i recently wrote to brandylee, telling her that cohesion of community and community in general are passions close to my heart. i asked her how she see's cohesion encouraged in a virtual forum... i'm going to make the leap and say that the attributes she responded with encourage cohesion in any type of community. i've toyed with her words a bit... i have such a habit of doing that!

extend yourself to others,
help ensure that noone is overlooked,
lend integrity to a superficial exchange with authenticity,
liven up a dull thread/area with infectious enthusiasm,
revive a dead one with passion and persistence.
listen to people carefully and respond to them reflectively,
don't limit your contributions to certain "strains" of threads/ (certain places in the community)
be exactly where you need to be at any given time!

other thoughts about community have been stirring from some work corrigan has been sharing at parking lot and this wiki. he's working with a small community which is having a serious problem with drugs among their youth. the information and discussions at those two links are extremely valuable. a suggestion for an open space theme for that community was:

how can i contribute to a safe community that gives hope to ourselves and our children?

my current dreaming about community leaves these questions:

what does your ideal community look like?
what do you value in your community?
what do you yearn for in your community?
what are you doing to support those aspects of your community?
how can you contribute to your community, helping to co-create your ideal community?

with these dreams tumbling in my head i received a poignant email from jake:

I think if America sleeps through another election it may just be heading for a coma. I feel like I know how the "minority opinion" must have felt as the Third Reight began to capture the majority of German public opinion and eventually of that nation through media and ideology. It must have been like trying to speak reason to folks in a hurricane.

whatever communities you are involved in, be an active participant. invest energy into creating your ideal community.

comments:
Hi Ashley,

You've opened up a very valuable conversation deserving the widest participation.

I've come to the position that we've spent enormous energy of thought and other resources on developing individuals and family while neglecting the bed in which they are set - community! We're reacting to a deep growing sense of alienation and insignificance at the personal level.

I believe the Community is Primary, and if conditions are not put right at source no matter how well we attend to the Secondary, individual and family, their ill-health and or deterioration will continue.

Can a turnaround begin by re-emphasizing thoughtfulness on some of the following - our neighbors, our neighborhood, our children, our values, our responsibility, our commitment to the common good!

It is when these are healthy, I believe, we have the best opportunity to feel safe enough to permit the emergence of our deeper, more beautiful, tender and powerful selves.

All the best

Mike C.
Mike Cumberbatch | Email | 06.08.04 - 2:30 pm | #

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Yeah Mike! That's the kind of thing I'm looking at too!
Chris Corrigan | Email | Homepage | 06.08.04 - 10:43 pm | #

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smile
me too

right now our camp community has about 35 adults, and we're holding space for 40 youth, who will return to us next week for eleven days.

questions we are asking in our community right now:
what practices (both individual and collective) ESTABLISH and RESTORE: trust, boundaries, responsibility, respect, freedom, flow...

we also have generated a new wheel - experimenting with a medicine wheel pattern as a symbol & guide for being together has been rich. at the center, the place of purpose (or mystery), this one has "passages" - the name of our 11-day camp. becoming. in the east: belonging (& the "village code" that details this- truthfulness, boundaries, connect/respect...). south: freedom. west: power (as in martha graham: keep the channel open). north: fun! (flow)

just a glimpse of tools & touchstones of one emerging community.

love.
chris weaver | Email | 06.09.04 - 5:22 am | #