The following re-post is a piece I wrote for our intentional community’s web journal. With a few years of painstaking research and trial-and-error, we assembled egalitarian tools for decision-making, legal forms for sharing land as partners instead of landlords, and some open-hearted yet strong ways of maintaining harmony within our Circle — even with a variety of personalities bumping into one another as we worked to sort this all out.

As we prepared to go public and promote our venture, it was clear that many people had no experience with this form of living, instead lived within a shell of fear, through which kind words from outside echoed as coercion, and gestures to reach in smacked of threat.

Maintaining our ideals and believing in the ability to bring about constructive change is the only response to unimaginative, bellicose thought. It’s what balances the scales. As we watch our nation crawl closer to the kind of state we once reviled (“Cyber-attack will be considered an act of war”: today’s news, opening the door to more military options), it is worth holding our humanity close, guarding a little light, for the time when this and other government’s ability to distinguish peace from aggression is eclipsed.

April 25, 2009

An Audience

I found it hard to get through my morning exercises today, as thoughts kept hammering at the door of my attention: some smaller, some larger, some niggling, some bullying. With all that crowd howling, it was difficult to give myself to my practice. Try to read when the baby is crying, or sleep when the cat is yowling for food or to be let out, with the simulation baby’s-cry they’ve perfected over long companionship with humans. Momentary successes doomed to inevitable resignation, rising, responding.

Most of the thoughts were well known to me, having visited so often — acquaintances who always come to beg, never to give. When I am weak, they win my time and energy; when I am centered, they are left to fend for themselves. But one voice in particular stood out as I tried to become still, was patient instead of petulant or petty, and because it cooed instead of cawed it undermined my inattention. It simply asked: Follow the leader?

That’ll Never Work

A week ago, friend and community co-founder Lyra, having understood that she really needed some easy time in good company, sent out an invitation for a Movie Night. Being in community is at least as important as working in community, not always, not only, to be laboring together. More than a theory, it’s a tried and true, sanity-saving practice for those who like to roll up their sleeves: if we work and work and never play, we might build a city, yes… but when we move in, the streets would be hard and full of friction and denials, instead of the joyful and celebratory arrival we’d dreamed.

So last night, a dozen of us sleeve-rollers drove in or walked in, flopped down on the fold-out, curled up on couches or pillows or in chairs, and chatted and snacked and laughed together. The film itself didn’t matter: it was pretext, a little container into which we could pour ourselves. That’s what community is, too. Lyra and Peter were there, and PJ and Keun and Kyounghee (who gave PJ a lift, since she had hurt herself and wasn’t driving), and Christine accompanied by her sense of humor (or vice-versa?), and Davide and Kim (our Iowa office representative), and Becca and Mackenzie (future hopefuls from middle Mass.), and me.

Life is lighter when it is shared, and all but the most intransigent problems shy away from a circle of friends. We spoke of our “recents” and our “near futures”: Kyounghee traveling to Korea to visit her homeland (Well, I don’t really have a homeland anymore; I live with one foot in one home and one foot in another…); this weekend’s literary festival, helped along by adjunct communard, great teacher and local hopeful Debbie; this good restaurant someone had enjoyed or that better recipe someone had tried; yesterday’s story remembering another from childhood. In and around the threads of conversation, the topic of community inevitably came up, our community, and several mentioned strong negative responses to our project from family and from acquaintances:

• Well, that’ll NEVER work, or
• Huh. Sounds like a cult to me, or
• Who’re the people who started this thing? I bet they’re going to take it over.

“Take it over…?”

Now why does that phrase, or that thought, cause me pain? Partly, it is because fear seeds fear, where hearts and minds are fertile soil — every heart: my heart: my mind. We see how those interested in power, using the devices of power, use bits of sound a derision to make a truth of nonsense, to fog the glass. The clouded glass permits outlines, through which the eyes, squinting, see a dagger where there’s a pen, a grimace where there’s a smile, and hazard in the garden in place of hope. When that poisoned seed is planted in you, there are two choices: recoil and create a shell of fear, taking the shape of that black seed, a fist; or gently, carefully, ease your fingers into the hurt and, like a good gardener, remove the weed.

Whether your respond with a fist or a gardener’s open hand, swallowing that seed is painful.

Idea as Violence

Seeding the concept “take over” is in itself a violence, wind-born from a world where violence is common parlance. It spans all languages, leaps language to become a lack of touch, goes beyond lack of touch to become a “tragic expression of an unmet need”, finds its version of embrace in a slap. The slap in itself doesn’t sadden you: it evokes a reflex anger. It is when you discard the anger, when you know that better than a slap exists, that the idea of it sickens, the hopelessness of a slap aches, and its intention sows that poison weed in your garden.

As I root around with my gardener’s glove, though, the more insidious pain lies behind the words, lies beneath the idea, in the source of despair that desires destruction. It wants gifts to be chains. It wants service to be cynical, and wants what is given to always expect a return. It wants action to be a tightening trigger, or a hand lifting the haft of a brand. It wants subordination to exist, and for subordination to exist (here is the destruction) it needs subordinators.

To keep the shell of fear intact, conscious community must veil an evil, Someone or some Ones must take over, and those within their circle of influence must be overtaken.

A Swallowed Stone

When one of our number — one of the community of Humans on this tiny planet Earth — when any one of our number fails to see a deity as a recognizable face, when he or she can find nothing larger and uplifting beyond this ephemeral self (no matter what form that takes: Christ or Buddha, Allah or Lao Tzu or Patanjali or Great Spirit… this being the order of my memory, not of importance nor completeness), then solitude is heavy as a swallowed stone, relationship an exchange of small stonings; and a group of people trying to share resources (without too much strife), growing and cooking good food together, or playing or writing music, or sitting quietly, or watching a movie, or building a bunch of houses(!) could be, I suppose, a cult.

Ouch! I find in that seed of isolation a drop of poison so concentrated that my body instantly begins to knot, and my heart clenches like a fist — a posture I know all too well. Yet with great patience and as much gentleness, with as much art as I can summon, my garden trowel a few paragraphs on a page, I work that seed out of me with time, and drop it in the dust.

Just one voice from a man I never met! I know there are many more of them, the anonymous fearful, like foxtail seed blown in a Minnesota field. That’s all right. We are here in this life to become good gardeners.

The Anti-Cult

Here’s how the anti-cult works.

Any who pretends authority loses all Authority;
and one who would bind others with their gifts
will by their own design those Gifts deny.

The business of community is not as obvious as it seems: the shared labor, the good food, the music; the companionship, the movies, the houses, they’re are all just pretext. Instead, it is Community itself which is the face of a deity, and being one arc of a circle which makes the circle whole. If I understand the teachings of our spiritual and ethical teachers well enough, Mastery comes from surrender to something greater than the self, and true leadership never asks for submission, but simply good companions.

The Buddha, they say, did not call himself the teaching, but instead said “I looked out and found something. That something I now serve. If it seems, to you, that you live more gently this way, then accompany me. The road here is good.” The Buddha, they say, was a master of martial arts, could wield a sword to make nations bow. Instead, he bowed, and lifted nations on his shoulders.

In our fledgling community, with guidance from living and past teachers and builders, we have created a vision and a mission that can help us draw a Path through an open field. Each of us brings our gifts to decorate the travel. We commit to living with as much harmony as we can learn, even if that means stepping away from the comfort of habitual fear, and studying instead how to empower others, and to be supported ourselves.

If community is taken over, there is no Community. If you walk accompanied, it is a good road.

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