Community (9.21.14)

Good morning. Happy Sunday. Happy Solstice everyone!

What is community and how do you build it?

Community is more than the place you live or the people you see as you drive about and run errands. Community is almost like extended family...some people you know well and some not so well, but you treat them all with respect, kindness and extend help when needed, as they do the same for you.

I have moved around a lot, and I realize that it has only been in the past five years or so that my nuclear family and I began to really experience what community is really about. Is it because we could search for people online?

Is the internet responsible for bringing people together via social media, blogs and websites? It certainly seems easier than ever now to search for local groups in a particular region. This is how we personally find local food co-ops, local organic food producers, farmer's markets, alternative builders and most of our off grid/homesteading wants and needs. The internet. Craigslist has proven invaluable for finding and selling goods, livestock and feed. Sometimes we find ourselves developing neighborhood relationships based around those original exchanges.

Still, I don't think the web is the end all to creating community. Surely we find things in common with members of our Facebook groups, but somehow those online encounters seem less than ideal and leave us wanting more. To me, it seems that it isn't until you actually can meet a person face to face and have a conversation while looking into their eyes that a real connection and possible friendship begins to develop. Until then, aren't they just a voice on the screen?

There is nothing like putting down roots in a place and extending your reach outward to welcome others into your life. The joy comes in sharing a meal, working together toward a common end, or just simply enjoying each other's company in the space of Nature around you.

It is vitally important in creating community that people begin to share physical time and space and form real bonds around doing things together. It is these bonds that are the glue that hold people together in what can come to be known as community. It is through actual interaction that a community grows and expands, becoming stronger as the members allow themselves to know one another on more personal levels. We are each more than our job or the label placed upon us by the things we do. Underneath skin and bones, we are all the same -- humans, sharing energy and reflecting the Universe back at one another.

So, get out there! Join a new group, garden with your neighbors, meet the local people that share your town and neighborhood. Meet some of those internet friends in person. Get involved in something meaningful in your area. Your participation insures your own membership in the local scene of the place you have chosen to call home. Your involvement insures meaningful time spent in life and practice in relating to others on the physical plane rather than through an internet connection.

Through community, the American culture has a chance to redeem itself as we strive to help one another in these increasingly difficult times. As we get to know one another in meaningful ways, it becomes second nature to share our resources, which allows us to interact in the local economy and bypass the impersonal quagmire of the corporatocracy more often than not.

It all comes back around. Time is circular and the effort you put in today will be rewarded tomorrow. A community is like that circle -- a living, spinning, changing thing -- a web of give and take, pull and release, back and forth action -- reciprocity-- dependent on the whole, shared organism. We get what we put in.

Love to all.

~Rev. Kerry