september: notice
monthly theme: [community]
I’ve been contemplating our inherently tribal inclinations for a while now; the idea that we cannot exist without each other blows my mind each time I allow myself to sit in the weight of such vulnerability, trust, and connection. The beauty of being able to lean on each other makes me tear up with joy and then subsequent fear when I recognize how asking for support often triggers my fight, flight, freeze, or fawn response. Grieving the opportunities when I could’ve been held, I notice how I (or others or social norms) encouraged a push rather than a pull.
Solange Pessoa (Brazilian, b.1961)
Emotional wounds and trauma often occur in community settings. Pain is caused by one party to another. When that pain is not resolved, but rather kept secret or denied, trust is lost and deeper wounds fester. It’s maddening to think of this cycle of abuse, all of us reenacting our pain onto each other. But this is the reality of our lived experience of community. Harm is apparent and undeniable. But there are more options in dealing/healing from it than pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. These patterns, like the humans who enact them, are changeable, mutable, and adaptable. I wouldn’t be working on this project if I thought otherwise.
Are power structures inherent to your definition and upkeep of community?
Can you imagine a conglomerate of humans who choose to avoid hierarchies and work in unison to achieve their goals?Dream of ways in which this type of community can mitigate harm and keep care as its driving force, ensuring that no one is left behind and that all needs are met.
It’s possible, I really believe it is. And I also believe that to get to this “utopia,” we must individually dissect what we’ve been taught and how we’ve acted in terms of in-groups and out-groups. It seems counterintuitive to start with the individual when discussing community; however, communities only exist because individuals set (or break) expectations, boundaries, norms, laws, etc. The communal experience exists because individuals decided to come together in a shared space for a common goal--initially, survival.
What did you learn about people who did not go to your school, church, or live in your community?
Do you still agree with these lessons?
As you’ve grown up, how has your identity and the identity of your community changed or evolved?
Can you theorize why and how these shifts have occurred or not occurred?
To start with this, I’m suggesting we each build a mind-map around our ideas, actions, beliefs, hopes, and rules in regards to community as a theory and praxis. Can you list all of the categories you belong to? All of the identities in which you inhabit and draw a parallel to those who seem opposite to you?
Each time I partake in this experiment of the mind, I quickly zoom through the labels given to me from birth and jump right to our global community. Like a neighborhood, the world is a group of people defined by a shared location and resources, the place where we all live--the Earth. It’s one thing we all have in common--every person who has ever lived has been under the same sun. Experienced the same laws of gravity.
No matter what creed, country, or disability, each of us has been born into this carbon-based existence. We all rely on plants to take our exhales and turn them into inhales. Each human being has lived under the same decaying ozone layer. This realization of dependence on shared resources makes me wonder how anyone could be indifferent to the survival and quality of life of anyone else...and yet that is not the reality I see when I stare into the void of a screen.
Why do you think this is?
Where did the power dynamics and exclusionary tactics begin?
How do you still partake in them as an active and/or passive participant?
What is one small action you can take to live a more communal life?
How can you include every human being’s needs when you imagine building a new future?
How can structures be used to support the survival of all?
commit an act of community
and share some feedback with me
(if you wanna)
your turn to map out your communities, your role(s) within them, and what all of that means as you zoom further and further out:
feel free to use one of these templates, be inspired by them, or make one that is completely your own :)
