Reverb10, Day 7: Redefining Community

Todays prompt is: Community. Where have you discovered community, online or otherwise, in 2010? What community would you like to join, create or more deeply connect with in 2011?

Prompt Author: Cali Harris
caligater.com
@caligater

My definition of community includes, but is not limited by those living in close geographic proximity to me. It includes friends all over the world, my family, groups I belong to and my neighbours, colleagues and community members. Some of these people I see daily. Some I see monthly. Some I only see once a year, and some I have not seen in many years. I stay connected through the phone. Through Facebook. Through old fashioned, hand-written letters. Some people I even drive across the continent to connect with!

My friends and family have always been very important to me. Maybe because I am an only child, I'm not sure. When I was younger I thought there was no way I would manage to keep in touch with most of the people I have met, but somehow, years later, I still maintain close relationships with far more amazing people than I would ever have thought was possible.

Over the last year, the amazing diversity of my community has been highlighted. As I crossed the continent, visiting friends, I realized how much I consider these people to be my family even though I had not seen some of them for going on ten years. Spending time with them in person made me reflect on how fluid community really is today. One minute I am on the other side of the planet from my friends, and the next minute I am hiking through the desert with them, sitting and writing together under a wide open blue sky.

This spring I went on pilgrimage to the Baha'i Holy Land in Israel. My pilgrim group was composed of people coming from all over the planet. I had only met one of two of them before arriving in Israel, but spending ten days immersed in the blissful state of prayer with these people transformed the group from a random collection of individuals into a unified community. I have kept in touch with a number of these people since returning to the US, and because of the nature of how I got to know them, the relationships formed during my pilgrimage will always hold a special significance to me. An example of how long these seemingly random connections last is a chance encounter I had recently with Mitra, a woman who was in my pilgrim group the last time I was on pilgrimage, in 1998. She and her husband and their daughter just moved to Sacramento, and I met them through friends. Although Mitra did not remember me, I immediately felt that we had a connection, although I could not remember where we had met. After some time I finally remembered having met her in Israel so many years earlier. Reconnecting so many years later, and the fact that at some level my heart knew that I had shared something very special with Mitra made me realize how connected community is, and how relationships are a vast interconnected pattern of interactions that keep circling around and back on themselves over and over.

Since arriving in Sacramento I have made a new circle of friends from all over. Many of us are only here for a short time, but we have still managed to create our own little community. I have also managed to re-connect with old friends who I had kept in touch with from a distance while I was living in Canada, and have been able to deepen these friendships in new ways. I have been missing my closely knit community in Canada, but we have kept in touch by phone and email, supporting each other and sharing our lives from a distance. Strengthening these friendships across the distance has deepened them in ways that I had never considered when we were living five minutes away from each other. The distance adds new dimensions, and makes me realize how precious the five and a half years that I spent living in the same physical community with them were.

In trying to develop my writing, and find my career path in life, I have joined an online community called Loving Inquiry, being facilitated by Ahava Shira, a good friend of mine who recently finished her PhD, and is discovering her talents as an educator, poet and facilitator of women's workshops. This group is made up of women I have never met, a friend of mine from Sacramento who is exploring her path in life, and a friend back on Prince Edward Island. It brings us all together in a creative, welcoming space in which we can share our writing, our art, our reflections, and our life experiences and questions.

There are so many communities that I consider myself a part of, many of them interlocking and overlapping. There are also communities that I would like to join. One community I am only just starting to explore is the community of fellow writers. I am writing more and more regularly, but I have yet to join a local writers group, which I think would facilitate my creative process, and help me to improve my writing. I have also not read publicly here in Sacramento, and I think doing so would get me off the page and bring my poetry and stories to life in a new way. I miss having my hands in the soil. Joining a gardening or farming group would encourage me to get back outside planting and nurturing life again. A few weeks ago I went for a hike with a group of total strangers. It was a day of pure joy. I would love to do more of this, and create a community that thrives on being out in the natural world like I do. 

There is so much to look forward to. Community is always changing and growing. Moving does not necessarily mean loss -- it just means accepting that my relationships will change and grow in new ways. I am looking forward to continuing to grow within my expanding, fluid community as I move into a new year. To meeting new faces and to experiencing new things with old friends. What communities are you a part of? What communities do you want to connect with?