The Finest Community

“People of great material deprivation, the very thing that the West is trying to avoid, find themselves loaded with the power to give more than those who have great material wealth.  The best they can give, all that they can give, is themselves.  Every Westerner who visits my village leaves with one thing, and that is the experience of the intensity of human connection and attention.  An awareness of the intensity of human connection is what visitors take away.  This is what makes them long to return again, because that is what they don’t get here in the West”

– Malidoma Some  (From “The Healing Wisdom of Africa”)

Community has been on my mind for some time.  Now that I’ve achieved a level of financial freedom, I find that community is what I yearn for most of all.  And I find that I’m not alone.

Every where I go, every American I meet- I find people who feel isolated.  People are cut off from their extended families.  They are cut off from their closest friends.

Everyone is busy– busy with the distractions of consumerism… and the immense amount of work required to maintain those distractions.

This weekend, I was reminded just how important community is.  I went to a memorial service for an old friend,..  and re-connected there with the finest community I have ever belonged to.  Tremendous nostalgia gripped me.  A flood of memories.

And only now, more than 15 years later, do I realize how much the people of Bryn Madoc gave me– how they supported me, taught me, encouraged me, accepted me.    And not just me– many others.

Since leaving, I have never found a finer group of people, nor a stronger community. I found myself filled with gratitude, and a desire to somehow give back to the people who have given me so much.

This was Tom’s final gift to all of us– an opportunity to re-connect and remember what is most important in life.

For me, it’s the people in it– those special people we share our life with.

We have the opportunity, at any moment, to make them our first priority.  We can choose to structure our life for community.  We can choose to fight for it.  We can choose to dedicate ourselves to building connection.

Increasingly, those are the choices I wish to make