september: intention
“Oh hey, I saw you walking your dog this morning at like 6 am!” is a thing my heart told me to say to this stranger who was leaving the Trader Joe’s as I entered. I’d witnessed them that morning patiently walking their pup. I noticed the sweetness and care they have for animals, waking up before the sun to make sure their pet’s needs are met. No longer a stranger, but someone I recognized. A mirror in which I could see myself because we inhabited the same space at the same time. Sweetness, vulnerability, and familiarity was what I projected onto this person in my neighborhood--a community based on proximity.
I don’t even know their pronouns and yet I feel so connected to their story, their life as it exists not even a mile away from mine. All because our circadian rhythms synched twice in one day.
Alone together or together alone...Do they bring the same truth, these phrases tossed around to get us comfortable with the “unprecedented time” of self-isolationism? What have they meant to you? Individuality and community? Two sides of the same coin.
I remember early on in the pandemic, mourning the feeling of ever being truly understood (not necessarily related to my pandemic experience, but definitely inspired by the new cadence of relationship and connection brought on by isolation). One of my friends found freedom in this inability to be perfectly understood, which at first seemed utterly delirious to me. What am I if I am not known?
Realizing all of me could never be completely known by all of someone else (and vice versa), I mourned this idealized sense of connection and community I once yearned for. And where else could I go from this grief other than further into my study of self, excavating parts of me that I misunderstood because I’d chosen to take someone else’s word for it and instead of speaking what I knew, my truth.
I found someone new within my own depths, hiding in the shadows, asking for things I’d never heard of. My needs are no longer vicarious, but mine--all mine--and clearer than day...now how do I ask for them to be met? And how do I notice when to meet others’? What expectations exist when we partake in the communal act of sharing and receiving?
Community is an action--a practice--something helping us to breathe, eat, and sleep. Literally. You don’t grow or create everything you consume, do you? Were the hands who made your silverware and plates attached to your arms? Each meal is a tiny miracle that wouldn’t exist without the expertise of farmers, day laborers, truck drivers, supply chain analysts, and market employees. It takes a whole village just to get you a bowl of cereal.
As an individual, once again isolated due to the delta variant, “community” becomes a haze that I reach into, begging each member to just do their part. This entire pandemic has been about collective action. And I’ve always believed that such group efforts would be our salvation from the individualism causing our destruction. But the reality of mass-panic and a refusal to change our ways for the benefit of others has been so incredibly heartbreaking to witness, yet ultimately unsurprising.
There seems to exist at least 2 different realities which can be observed by the habit of wearing a mask or not. To me, and most likely you if you’re reading this, the answer seems so simple. We believe the appropriate action is obvious because scientists are telling us what it is based on their best research. Do you consider those with different masking habits as part of your community? How do you think opposing actions and beliefs affect our collective unconscious? Is that Jungian theory even something you believe in?
and yet we still need bees and flies
because there is pollin and shit
Where are you at right now with your community? Chosen and forced? Agreeable and hostile? Where do you draw your borders through which groups you do and do not belong to? What kind of intention do you need to set in order to hold the idea of “community” as sacred and life-giving as it once was for all human beings?
I’ve teetered back and forth between deep resentments and deeper compassion for those who have navigated the pandemic differently than me. In place of judgment, I accepted others were going to see things differently and act in accordance with their beliefs. It’s not easy, but those whose decisions actively harm(ed/ are harming) community members are still part of the larger community--that’s why their actions have an effect at all. Is it helpful to section off our country further? To draw deeper lines in the sand? The ego says, “yes,” while the collective unconscious weeps.
Communities often require interaction, a shared language, and understanding (a common goal, hopefully); all of which seem to have dissolved over the last year and a half. Maybe the intention with community is to simply hold the weight of how important and fragile our inherent interdependence is. To be aware of the way individualism skews our ideas of where we belong and where we do not; as if anywhere on Gaia’s green earth was exclusive.
What do you believe about the future of our community/country/world? And does this belief match your actions? Do your actions match your words? Is it a belief that is sustainable and helpful for you to get out of bed each morning? Or does your belief simply make you angry or shut down in hopeless cynicism?
In June, we traversed the idea of isolation, and now we’ve met its sister: community. Connection. Seeing ourselves as one part of a whole. Understanding that the gaps between knowing “you” and “me” are not blank voids, but oceans full of wisdom and opportunities to stretch our perspective of this world in which we coexist. But how do we get to the ocean if we’ve yet to row through our own rivers and streams? It is the same motion, just a slightly different direction.