Subj : Community
To   : Avon
From : Ben Collver
Date : Fri Jan 26 2024 10:33:49

  Re: Community
  By: Avon to All on Fri Jan 26 2024 06:24 pm

I enjoyed reading your musings on community, and i feel enthusiasm for
the potential of building community here.  Below are some relevant
quotes from my reading about the nature of community.

> Community is a group of people who observe the individual's growth. 
> Being seen and responded to enable a person to behold voices within,
> confirmed by the voices of the community without.  Where mentors and
> elders are lacking, where initiation in one form or another is not
> recognized, there can be no support system capable of curbing the
> intense sense of aloneness that haunts the psyche of the modern
> person.  Purpose begins with the individual, and the sum total of all
> the individuals' purposes creates the community's purpose.  A
> community is held together by the emotional ties that result in a
> conscious feeling of connection...  A sense of community grows where
> behavior is based on trust and where no one has to hide anything.
>
> --Malidoma Some

> If we are going to use the word [community] meaningfully we must
> restrict it to a group of individuals who have learned how to
> communicate honestly with each other, whose relationships go deeper
> than their masks of composure, and who have developed some
> significant commitment to "rejoice together, mourn together," and to
> "delight in each other, make others' conditions our own."
>
> The facets of community are interconnected, profoundly
> interrelated.  No one could exist without the other.  They create
> each other, make each other possible.  What follows, then, is but
> one scheme for isolating and naming the most salient
> characteristics of a true community.
>
> * Inclusivity, commitment, and consensus
> * Realism
> * Contemplation
> * A safe place
> * A laboratory for personal disarmament
> * A group that can fight gracefully
> * A group of all leaders
> * A spirit
> 
> --M. Scott Peck

> One of the strongest needs of the soul is for community, but
> community from the soul point of view is a little different from
> its social forms.  Soul yearns for attention, for variety in
> personality, for intimacy, and particularity.  So it is these
> qualities in community that the soul seeks out, and not
> like-mindedness and uniformity.
>
> Loneliness can be the result of an attitude that community is
> something into which one is received.  Many people wait for members
> of a community to invite them in, and until that happens they are
> lonely.  There may be something of the child here who expects to be
> taken care of by the family.  But a community is not a family.  It
> is a group of people held together by feelings of belonging, and
> these feelings are not a birthright.  "Belonging" is an active
> verb, something we do positively.
>
> -- Thomas Moore
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 * Origin: The Fool's Quarter, fqbbs.synchro.net (21:1/149)

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