That quote from Richard Wagamese got me to write down the book name to order ASAP!
Also, I was about to hit send on a too-long yackety-yack about community and how people often ask me how to build community and I have no idea but here's what I do. Weird vibes.
I was thinking, on the way home from a WTF is a vacation week, that in my frustration with the people of my wider community up here, I've lost sight of the rest of the community -- the chickadees and trees and soil and quiet places of the woods. And thought I need to balance that back out again. Humans can't be one's only community. Though you are a human I am grateful and honored to be in community with.
It's not lost on me that so many people (myself included) want to be writing about this right now — community, infrastructure of care, bounds that don't necessarily have to be those of exact-same-thinking or close friendship but just being in one another's presence.
Also Chris, I've been to that coffee shop in Lewistown, it ruled
As less of a 'rugged' individual, than more a somewhat 'bedraggled' one, it's occasionally hard to read about community, suspecting it to be something elusive, a moral sense of belonging/affirmation, perhaps, outside one's locus of control? As someone who always feels on the edges of things - a perpetual misfit even at this mid-life point! - I get glimpses of community in books/art, in the resonance of words, in newsletters like this one, in long-distance friendships that have survived the years, or on walks in empty landscapes along paths worn by other feet. It's arguably not 'enough', and certainly not the big-C Community that I could find any tangible proof of in daily life, but I wonder if some of us are OK with being off-centre, out-of-step in this way? Perhaps this is also worth aspiring to, and can similarly be a source of action and change? Or perhaps this is just a defensive twist, feeling once again the pull of something out of reach.
Clare, I really love this. You've basically described ME here as well (though I like to think of myself, in true Métis/mixed fashion, BOTH "rugged" and, particularly, "bedraggled" 😂), particularly as it relates to existing on the fringe. I am most comfortable on the fringe, on the outside looking in, etc. It gets lonely sometimes, but it is also a great opportunity to not have to make with the chitter chatter when one doesn't care to ... which is most of the time!
Ah, thanks for companionship on the edges! I'm never sure whether it's my innate distrust of the group, or their innate distrust of me? Something primal, for sure, in this standing-apart-ness of it all. I think I often feel a not-so-small sense of shame at any talk of 'community' and 'belonging', since they often feel inflexible scripts, handed out in advance. But really liking the loose sense of belonging that others in these comments have identified - the outsider's disruptive presence/absence that keeps a community alive (thinking of Basho going wandering, turning up in taverns - the impact of the poet; thinking of Shaw's forest dweller rocking up to the market square - the impact of the untamed/undomesticated; thinking about the person who goes out into the hills and returns with snatches of the wild in their mouth! Yes, some shameless romanticisation of it, but screw it - there IS a sense that society needs this dynamic to stay vital. Still possible to 'be with' as a semi-detached sort of being :) - maybe a 'being alongside' with more room to breathe.
i have no idea what community really means. i moved 18 times before i was 21. i've lived in denver since then. worked at the same shitty little community college for 27 years. taught at the same high school before that. spent years in churches until i couldn't stand them anymore. after i was diagnosed i found a kind of community among other people like me with parkinson's diseases--on-line and in person. we share a kind of experience each of us "gets" without having to explain. as i've gotten old i deeply long for role models examples stories for how to endure these painful last years and how to die well as possible. no one is there. i want to be an elder. no one wants one. i feel the need for community in these ways in my bones. it's gone. i grieve its loss without even know what the hell it is/was/coulda-been.
Wayne, I would like to make an argument against your assessment that "no one wants an elder" but, sadly, I think you are right. That is one of the great failings of this modern society. But that doesn't mean you aren't one. No one "chooses" to be an elder, it doesn't just happen because one gets old, you have to bring something to the table. And you do that every time you leave a comment here, and I imagine you do in other parts of your life too. I appreciate your wisdom. I wish I could sit in a room with you.
Lots of people are looking for community. When you think of what community was like for Indigenous peoples of the Plains, Norse settlers in Iceland, Metis trappers, English settlers in New England, pretty much anyone anywhere in the pre-Industrial age, the central organizing principle is that people are in family groups. With all the lack of privacy and worse that that entails. One hears of employers saying that their company is like a family -- have they met families? A whole lot of people are carrying a whole lot of trauma because of how their family life has gone.
To some extent, the search for community is a search for arcadia: a mythical state we dream about but seldom realize, especially for any kind of sustained period.
Obviously, though, among modern cosmopolitans, we have other organizing principles for gathering into social groups. Work, shared hobbies, small neighborhoods, churches, online collections of people with some kind of shared bond: none of them are quite as good as the myth. They're all often as good or better than an actual family-based communities of our ancestors, if for no reason other than ease of joining/leaving, and other forms of personal autonomy folks in the past really didn't have.
Anyway, I'll stop droning on now. Great newsletter, as always.
First, yours in solidarity--Muir, Roosevelt, all of that ilk makes me want to explode when I hear their names referenced with the history and ideals of 'conservation.' Like others who have commented, I struggle with community too--I'm over the individualist ethos we've been handed for so long, and yet I am happiest in the company of books, trees, birds around my home. My dogs. The lack of anonymity in this place is something I have wrestled with for nearly two decades now. I often think of the ideal community being one of parallel play--the knowing that others are out there who also have a relationship to the same place, thinking, feeling, going about their day, prompting new thoughts and observations and circumstances...but in an anonymous way? Community as the company of strangers? Sometimes I do think there could be something really lovely about anonymous dependence--to exist together and support one another, but not because of a personal relationship, but because we all exist as humans who happen to be in the same place and time. But maybe that's just a utopian ideal. Mostly, I feel such a keen sense of community when I read and am still surprised how it can feel so beautifully sufficient.
As an urban farmer, the concept of growing food and feeding those around us helps to build a community that I didn't know I needed but find extreme value in. The gratitude that comes from that kind of "helping each other" is what community means to me. I would encourage you to listen listened to a podcast called Women's Work, which is about the women who are reimagining how we raise meat. The fourth episode is about a woman who is restoring food sovereignty to her people – the Cheyenne River Sioux – by raising grass fed beef on the reservation and selling primarily to tribal members.
To be honest, I don't think I have a community. I don't think I've ever had a community. I don't think I understand the concept of community. I'm a loner. I have friends and associates. (Lots of associates...people I associate with.) But few of my friends are friends with each other. They often don't even know about each other. I grew up in a small town and hated the know-it-alls that liked to call themselves community. As I age, I ponder this lack of community in my life. I may, at some point, have to come down off my high horse and rely on some sort of community.
I guess when I think of community, I think of what happens when disaster strikes. When a dam fails, or a fire consumes, of war destroys. The people who come together and help each other survive are community, right? Great topic.
An informal community I belong to is those who walk in the woods up the street from where I live. There are those like me who walk alone, those who walk in pairs or family groups, those who walk with children, those who carry children, and those who walk with a dog or dogs. Occasionally there are grade school children on small bikes. It is unusual to see children walking in the woods without parents but I have seen a few in groups. If this sounds like the trails are crowded, I've given the wrong impression. I walk for a hour or more, much of the time meeting no one. When I was a small girl, I often walked alone in the woods in the hills to the west of San Francisco Bay with our family's dog, rarely seeing anyone else. The sense of community comes with the frequency with which we see each other, recognize each other and smile or wave hello and that all of us find peace and solace by spending time in the woods. I don't know the names of any of these people but they come from the neighborhoods surrounding the woods. All the generations and different income classes are represented. Mostly white people, but not all. Mostly American-born but not all. Then there are the owls, the towhees, the wrens, the ravens, the woodpeckers, the crows, the squirrels, the cedars, the alders, the cottonwoods, the ferns, the mosses, the lichens, and the Douglas firs.
Although I was raised in a suburb of NYC, I spent 30 years of my 50 years in New Hampshire living in the middle of the woods. It was exquisite but now that I am older I quite enjoy living in an apartment community within the little City of Keene. My neighbors and friends near and far, new and old, young and young at heart are my community. I am so very blessed.
I gotta get back … back in the New York groove. For me the KISS album was The Elder, the one nobody liked! As for community, I am sorely lacking. I used to visit my grandma and great-uncles every sunday for a long chat over coffee. We used to call it “solving the problems of the world.” They are all gone now, and I moved too far from my remaining family to drop in for coffee regularly. The coffee shops around here are the kind with laptops open, or the Wawa, with no tables. In northern NJ you could always find a few older men holding court at tables outside a bagel shop or Italian cafe, like they were in Napoli, or crows around a tasty bit of roadkill. I am getting old enough that I appreciate that kind of thing. There’s a Dunkin Donuts nearby that I haven’t visited because I’ve been cutting down on the doughnuts. But it might be nice to see who lives around here, and hear the chatter, even if we don’t become friends. We’re still neighbors.
On my way up onto the rez on Thursdays and Fridays there is a little grocery store I typically visit that has a small deli area and there is always a group of old coffee drinkers gathered there. I love the idea of that, even if I doubt I will ever participate in such a thing ... but never say never, right?
Describe the nature of your luck. I'm 75 now, and when I look back, which I do every day, I can describe my luck with one word... camaraderie. In small town Ohio, my parents were extremely social. Our house was party central. In the 1950s, my father piped music through all the social rooms. In high school, there was a co-ed core group of 12 of us: dancing, hootenannies, co-ed poker. In college, the often condemned fraternity experience turned out to be another source of lifelong friendships. In Missoula, our group of 12 was open, confrontational and brutally honest. In rural Tennessee on North Lick Creek, our group gatherings were akin to a rumble, with drinking and singing and laughter. And in Placitas, New Mexico, by virtue of a love affair, I walked into a group of 12 couples and their children and I was accepted immediately because of the woman who introduced me. One of the highest compliments I've ever received came from Chris in New Mexico... "Isn't it just like you to fall in love with the group."
I used to enjoy an afternoon cup at Mammyth after classes with a little something sweet and watch people walking by while also catching pits and pieces of conversations when I stayed the night in town rather than drive back to Polson back in the day. Not quite the same, but then I've spent the bulk of my life in small towns, so I'm with you there. I've a book recommend for you (not that you have a lot of free time for a big, dense tome), speaking of TR and EA: "The Humbolt Current" by Aaron Sachs. Talks about Humbolt, JN Reynolds, Clarence King, George Wallace Melville, and John Muir (who falls in line with TR & EA more than is acknowledged) and touches somewhat on their interactions with native people they encountered in their explorations. Anyway, another fine piece this week.
I wonder how the big dust-up is going at the Sierra Club these days over Muir? That's the problem: people just don't like to see the dudes they make busts out of and put on pedestals challenged at all.
That quote from Richard Wagamese got me to write down the book name to order ASAP!
Also, I was about to hit send on a too-long yackety-yack about community and how people often ask me how to build community and I have no idea but here's what I do. Weird vibes.
I was thinking, on the way home from a WTF is a vacation week, that in my frustration with the people of my wider community up here, I've lost sight of the rest of the community -- the chickadees and trees and soil and quiet places of the woods. And thought I need to balance that back out again. Humans can't be one's only community. Though you are a human I am grateful and honored to be in community with.
I've been doing a major refocusing on my nonhuman relative community as well. I'm grateful for your community as well!
It's not lost on me that so many people (myself included) want to be writing about this right now — community, infrastructure of care, bounds that don't necessarily have to be those of exact-same-thinking or close friendship but just being in one another's presence.
Also Chris, I've been to that coffee shop in Lewistown, it ruled
"bounds that don't necessarily have to be those of exact-same-thinking or close friendship but just being in one another's presence." This, yes.
GOOD POINTS!
And now I want to go to Lewistown and eat doughnuts.
FRESH DAILY!
You're killing me. My mom plays at the Lewistown Poets & Pickers festival every August. Maybe I should go for once.
As less of a 'rugged' individual, than more a somewhat 'bedraggled' one, it's occasionally hard to read about community, suspecting it to be something elusive, a moral sense of belonging/affirmation, perhaps, outside one's locus of control? As someone who always feels on the edges of things - a perpetual misfit even at this mid-life point! - I get glimpses of community in books/art, in the resonance of words, in newsletters like this one, in long-distance friendships that have survived the years, or on walks in empty landscapes along paths worn by other feet. It's arguably not 'enough', and certainly not the big-C Community that I could find any tangible proof of in daily life, but I wonder if some of us are OK with being off-centre, out-of-step in this way? Perhaps this is also worth aspiring to, and can similarly be a source of action and change? Or perhaps this is just a defensive twist, feeling once again the pull of something out of reach.
Clare, I really love this. You've basically described ME here as well (though I like to think of myself, in true Métis/mixed fashion, BOTH "rugged" and, particularly, "bedraggled" 😂), particularly as it relates to existing on the fringe. I am most comfortable on the fringe, on the outside looking in, etc. It gets lonely sometimes, but it is also a great opportunity to not have to make with the chitter chatter when one doesn't care to ... which is most of the time!
Ah, thanks for companionship on the edges! I'm never sure whether it's my innate distrust of the group, or their innate distrust of me? Something primal, for sure, in this standing-apart-ness of it all. I think I often feel a not-so-small sense of shame at any talk of 'community' and 'belonging', since they often feel inflexible scripts, handed out in advance. But really liking the loose sense of belonging that others in these comments have identified - the outsider's disruptive presence/absence that keeps a community alive (thinking of Basho going wandering, turning up in taverns - the impact of the poet; thinking of Shaw's forest dweller rocking up to the market square - the impact of the untamed/undomesticated; thinking about the person who goes out into the hills and returns with snatches of the wild in their mouth! Yes, some shameless romanticisation of it, but screw it - there IS a sense that society needs this dynamic to stay vital. Still possible to 'be with' as a semi-detached sort of being :) - maybe a 'being alongside' with more room to breathe.
i have no idea what community really means. i moved 18 times before i was 21. i've lived in denver since then. worked at the same shitty little community college for 27 years. taught at the same high school before that. spent years in churches until i couldn't stand them anymore. after i was diagnosed i found a kind of community among other people like me with parkinson's diseases--on-line and in person. we share a kind of experience each of us "gets" without having to explain. as i've gotten old i deeply long for role models examples stories for how to endure these painful last years and how to die well as possible. no one is there. i want to be an elder. no one wants one. i feel the need for community in these ways in my bones. it's gone. i grieve its loss without even know what the hell it is/was/coulda-been.
Wayne, I would like to make an argument against your assessment that "no one wants an elder" but, sadly, I think you are right. That is one of the great failings of this modern society. But that doesn't mean you aren't one. No one "chooses" to be an elder, it doesn't just happen because one gets old, you have to bring something to the table. And you do that every time you leave a comment here, and I imagine you do in other parts of your life too. I appreciate your wisdom. I wish I could sit in a room with you.
thank you. i would to sit w/you as well. one day...
Today, I was wallowing in my own misery (both on and offline) and I thought, "I need a new Chris newsletter!" Thank you. I needed this.
Buffalo sliders, Lyz! 🍔
I am starving now. Thanks.
Lots of people are looking for community. When you think of what community was like for Indigenous peoples of the Plains, Norse settlers in Iceland, Metis trappers, English settlers in New England, pretty much anyone anywhere in the pre-Industrial age, the central organizing principle is that people are in family groups. With all the lack of privacy and worse that that entails. One hears of employers saying that their company is like a family -- have they met families? A whole lot of people are carrying a whole lot of trauma because of how their family life has gone.
To some extent, the search for community is a search for arcadia: a mythical state we dream about but seldom realize, especially for any kind of sustained period.
Obviously, though, among modern cosmopolitans, we have other organizing principles for gathering into social groups. Work, shared hobbies, small neighborhoods, churches, online collections of people with some kind of shared bond: none of them are quite as good as the myth. They're all often as good or better than an actual family-based communities of our ancestors, if for no reason other than ease of joining/leaving, and other forms of personal autonomy folks in the past really didn't have.
Anyway, I'll stop droning on now. Great newsletter, as always.
Thanks, Charley.
First, yours in solidarity--Muir, Roosevelt, all of that ilk makes me want to explode when I hear their names referenced with the history and ideals of 'conservation.' Like others who have commented, I struggle with community too--I'm over the individualist ethos we've been handed for so long, and yet I am happiest in the company of books, trees, birds around my home. My dogs. The lack of anonymity in this place is something I have wrestled with for nearly two decades now. I often think of the ideal community being one of parallel play--the knowing that others are out there who also have a relationship to the same place, thinking, feeling, going about their day, prompting new thoughts and observations and circumstances...but in an anonymous way? Community as the company of strangers? Sometimes I do think there could be something really lovely about anonymous dependence--to exist together and support one another, but not because of a personal relationship, but because we all exist as humans who happen to be in the same place and time. But maybe that's just a utopian ideal. Mostly, I feel such a keen sense of community when I read and am still surprised how it can feel so beautifully sufficient.
Anonymous dependence. I like that. Maybe I can find that kind of community as part of a sleeper cell, heh.
As an urban farmer, the concept of growing food and feeding those around us helps to build a community that I didn't know I needed but find extreme value in. The gratitude that comes from that kind of "helping each other" is what community means to me. I would encourage you to listen listened to a podcast called Women's Work, which is about the women who are reimagining how we raise meat. The fourth episode is about a woman who is restoring food sovereignty to her people – the Cheyenne River Sioux – by raising grass fed beef on the reservation and selling primarily to tribal members.
Thank you, Anica. I will look for that!
To be honest, I don't think I have a community. I don't think I've ever had a community. I don't think I understand the concept of community. I'm a loner. I have friends and associates. (Lots of associates...people I associate with.) But few of my friends are friends with each other. They often don't even know about each other. I grew up in a small town and hated the know-it-alls that liked to call themselves community. As I age, I ponder this lack of community in my life. I may, at some point, have to come down off my high horse and rely on some sort of community.
I guess when I think of community, I think of what happens when disaster strikes. When a dam fails, or a fire consumes, of war destroys. The people who come together and help each other survive are community, right? Great topic.
"I guess when I think of community—" is pretty much how I'm beginning to sense it works too, for the most part.
An informal community I belong to is those who walk in the woods up the street from where I live. There are those like me who walk alone, those who walk in pairs or family groups, those who walk with children, those who carry children, and those who walk with a dog or dogs. Occasionally there are grade school children on small bikes. It is unusual to see children walking in the woods without parents but I have seen a few in groups. If this sounds like the trails are crowded, I've given the wrong impression. I walk for a hour or more, much of the time meeting no one. When I was a small girl, I often walked alone in the woods in the hills to the west of San Francisco Bay with our family's dog, rarely seeing anyone else. The sense of community comes with the frequency with which we see each other, recognize each other and smile or wave hello and that all of us find peace and solace by spending time in the woods. I don't know the names of any of these people but they come from the neighborhoods surrounding the woods. All the generations and different income classes are represented. Mostly white people, but not all. Mostly American-born but not all. Then there are the owls, the towhees, the wrens, the ravens, the woodpeckers, the crows, the squirrels, the cedars, the alders, the cottonwoods, the ferns, the mosses, the lichens, and the Douglas firs.
That is MY kind of community. Thank you for this.
Although I was raised in a suburb of NYC, I spent 30 years of my 50 years in New Hampshire living in the middle of the woods. It was exquisite but now that I am older I quite enjoy living in an apartment community within the little City of Keene. My neighbors and friends near and far, new and old, young and young at heart are my community. I am so very blessed.
It sounds like you are, Melissa.
Wondering how I get a message to you Chris.. Thanks
chris [at] chrislatray [dot] com!
I gotta get back … back in the New York groove. For me the KISS album was The Elder, the one nobody liked! As for community, I am sorely lacking. I used to visit my grandma and great-uncles every sunday for a long chat over coffee. We used to call it “solving the problems of the world.” They are all gone now, and I moved too far from my remaining family to drop in for coffee regularly. The coffee shops around here are the kind with laptops open, or the Wawa, with no tables. In northern NJ you could always find a few older men holding court at tables outside a bagel shop or Italian cafe, like they were in Napoli, or crows around a tasty bit of roadkill. I am getting old enough that I appreciate that kind of thing. There’s a Dunkin Donuts nearby that I haven’t visited because I’ve been cutting down on the doughnuts. But it might be nice to see who lives around here, and hear the chatter, even if we don’t become friends. We’re still neighbors.
On my way up onto the rez on Thursdays and Fridays there is a little grocery store I typically visit that has a small deli area and there is always a group of old coffee drinkers gathered there. I love the idea of that, even if I doubt I will ever participate in such a thing ... but never say never, right?
I also happen to LOVE The Elder.
In high school I started a fantasy novel based on it. Now I'm more likely to write about a high school kid obsessed with the album.
I've got a vinyl copy that I play now and then
Man but those buffalo sliders look good. :).
They really do.
Describe the nature of your luck. I'm 75 now, and when I look back, which I do every day, I can describe my luck with one word... camaraderie. In small town Ohio, my parents were extremely social. Our house was party central. In the 1950s, my father piped music through all the social rooms. In high school, there was a co-ed core group of 12 of us: dancing, hootenannies, co-ed poker. In college, the often condemned fraternity experience turned out to be another source of lifelong friendships. In Missoula, our group of 12 was open, confrontational and brutally honest. In rural Tennessee on North Lick Creek, our group gatherings were akin to a rumble, with drinking and singing and laughter. And in Placitas, New Mexico, by virtue of a love affair, I walked into a group of 12 couples and their children and I was accepted immediately because of the woman who introduced me. One of the highest compliments I've ever received came from Chris in New Mexico... "Isn't it just like you to fall in love with the group."
So different from my experience. A group of 12? I don't think I could handle that.
I used to enjoy an afternoon cup at Mammyth after classes with a little something sweet and watch people walking by while also catching pits and pieces of conversations when I stayed the night in town rather than drive back to Polson back in the day. Not quite the same, but then I've spent the bulk of my life in small towns, so I'm with you there. I've a book recommend for you (not that you have a lot of free time for a big, dense tome), speaking of TR and EA: "The Humbolt Current" by Aaron Sachs. Talks about Humbolt, JN Reynolds, Clarence King, George Wallace Melville, and John Muir (who falls in line with TR & EA more than is acknowledged) and touches somewhat on their interactions with native people they encountered in their explorations. Anyway, another fine piece this week.
I wonder how the big dust-up is going at the Sierra Club these days over Muir? That's the problem: people just don't like to see the dudes they make busts out of and put on pedestals challenged at all.
I enjoyed this one, thanks.
Thank you, Sarah.