Thank you, Becca, and Chris, for addressing such an important topic. When I came to the US from Hungary in the early nineties, I was profoundly shocked how little community there was around me. In spite of the fact, that I arrived into the existing circle of friends and even family of my wife, I felt an insatiable hunger for more interdependency.
Since then a lot changed in where I live. Now there is a monthly potluck brunch in my 'hood, that brings neighbors together - for 20 years now, I got to know the cycling community, the setup of the town politics, and other shared interest/passion/values groups. I am still missing the embeddedness I had grown used to in Hungary.
This lack feels life-altering to me, so I have studied what causes it. I believe money is the main culprit. Since it really works here (if you have it), it makes it easy to get things I need and thus it reduces the importance of other people in my life. The other major issue is how entrenched we are in monogamy: this sets our lives up so we live in single family homes with our core families (if we have it) in relative financial independence from anyone else.
The model I grew up with was very different in Hungary: money didn't buy much, I had to have connections for getting most things and favors valuable. Stores didn't sell bananas (in fact they sold precious few items), so I only could get them if I had connections. And that person likely wouldn't want to give me bananas for money either, only for similar favors; say if I knew a chimney mason who actually knows how to fix chimneys. In addition to that, we knew who our enemy was, and it was the government: if I weren't deeply embedded in a large community, the police could just come and pick me up in the middle of the night, and nobody would know (or care?). The non-monogamy part among my circle of friends was also important, because the deep energetic exchange involved in sex boosted our sense of belonging and our commitment to each other. Communism made religion mostly irrelevant, and gathering on the streets of more than a few people wasn't looked at positively by the powers to be, so close-knit non-family connections became more important and meaningful, if not risky. So a group of us had a film-club for western, thus illegal, films, but why not boost the interconnectedness to each other with other high energy, and relatively low-risk behavior, like being sexual with others in the club (at that time AIDS was unheard of behind the iron curtain, and the worst I ever got was lice once…). This unleashed a lot of caring among members. I guess just like Becca talks about the shared passion of nature, that is also an energetic journey, but was not so readily available in Budapest. This caring went a long way, and also was like a middle finger for the govenment: see, you can suppress us, but we still enjoy life.
Not to discourage anyone, but I more and more feel, that with coming here I jumped from the frying pan, into the fire: money is only useful if you have it, and an increasing number of people don't. And what we see from police behavior looks more and more like the polizai in those eastern-bloc countries. Plus as perilous as our economy currently is, we don't need a war to render it inoperable, the California drought and some further financial shenanigans will just do fine to shut down the system we have grown so much more dependent on than most any other nations.
In short, community has became/remained immensely important in my life, and I have been working on creating it around me for many years now. While it is one of the hardest work I have done, it is also one that is expanding my life the most.
