Community

sunset over community alter in the snow

 How do we find authentic community in this time of internet and virtual world realities? This is a question posed to me over and over again in my practice and in my own day to day awareness. The truth of the matter is we can say anything we want online and in a time where life is so transient, many folks are just plain reluctant to get too "attached" or maybe too scared to move into trust...

I've discovered inside myself this impatience with the idea of home and community. I grew up in a place where one rarely left town.. It's incredibly difficult to leave a space and go out into the world to learn and grow. There is an innate and deep knowing of this in my birth community. I have lived in CT longer now than in the land where I began this life trip and I have been looking for "home" the entire time. When things got uncomfortable or difficult, I would uproot often quickly to the next chapter. I have since had an aha! moment strangely simple... "Home really IS where your heart is"! I know that sounds overly simplistic but wow, since I have settled into this realization and just stayed present, I get shown where I have community growing from seeds I planted years ago. Settling into our Sandy Hook home in the forest has taught me so much about change and seasons and growth and patience.
 
My husband and I decided to go looking for community out on the road Summer 2018 and while we did not find a place we would like to settle into elderhood in, we did find a common unity with other travelers. In a nutshell what we saw and learned about community was that for us it starts with letting go of our "safe" zone or as my dear one put it... "We were letting go of the edge of the pool in the deep end". The second part of our journey into community was to let go of judgements and to trust. Over and over our experience on the road taught us that we would be taken care of. That our needs are always met. Wait a minute... what? Yeah there is something deeper at work here... 

So here we were looking for community and finding a unity in the unknown. Hmm. There's a mind bender. What if there were ways of communication we aren't totally aware of? What if, we really are connected in a way that precedes language? What if, when our thoughts go out of "I need___" there is a response somewhere in the universe that puts us exactly in the right circumstances to fulfill that need? This was the magic we experienced on the road and continue to experience and try not to block.

So try it.. put out your wishes. keep them simple at first and clear and wait for a lovely surprise because it hardly ever shows up in the way you might expect!

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