Perhaps my last blog post left people hanging... My partner Liz had her surgery, it went well, and it was determined that she does not have cancer. She had her recovery from all of that at home, and now that whole episode, which was so intense for us emotionally at the time, is now pretty much a thing of the past. Her surgery was 42 days ago.
I feel like I am now in a state of preparation for another big transition in my life. We plan on moving out of our apartment six weeks from now, i.e. in 42 days. This feels like a big transition for me. We have lived at the apartment that I am at since 2016, and starting in six weeks I will enter a new period of vagabonding. Ultimately, my big focus is on what I want to transition to.
Basically, I want to live in an intentional community. I want to live a life that is more integrated together with the lives of other people, where there is more cooperation, sharing and collective decision-making. I am wanting to live a life where there is more active mutual support, people looking out for each other's well-being, assisting where there are limitations, empathically listening when that's needed, etc. Since I have lived in intentional communities before in the past, I know that this kind of thing is certainly not always the case for intentional community living. I suppose that what I am talking about here, what I am personally longing for, is to be a part of a special certain kind of intentional community where these things are present.
I do think that it is possible to intentionally create social situations where these kinds of relationships are in place. This requires a lot of awareness of what behavior patterns and actions are taking place between people, making clear and specific agreements and also having a clear and reliable means to give feedback to one another. There's certainly more that can be said about this topic, but now is not the time to go into all of this.
I am also wanting a community that has an orientation of service to others, as well as a holistic view of people. I would also like for the community to be what Twin Oaks Community calls "income-sharing" and what Nonviolent Global Liberation (aka "NGL") calls "risk sharing". I would also like for the place to be intergenerational, with a focus on dialogue and connection. So far the Camphill model for intentional communities is what I have found that comes the closest to the kind of thing that I am looking for. My ideal would be to have a Camphill-style intentional community that is based on NGL instead of Anthroposophy.
Right now however, I am confronted with the fact that I am accustomed to living a much more isolated mainstream life. I am habituated to separation from others, essentially. I have lived in intentional communities before in the past, yes, but that was quite some time ago, and to put it bluntly: I am just not used to it now. I certainly have much learning, skills development and personal growth to do in this area.
My journey going forward will be to see what communal living is like again, to travel places, meet people, have conversations, and figure things out gradually with the hopes of eventually being able to approximate the kind of life that I want to have.
Until I can get started on that, however, I have an apartment to clear out, plans to make and logistics to juggle. I do feel like I am slowly taking actions to move towards the kind of life that I want to live, and I need to continually remind myself to be patient and not move faster than I am able. If I move too fast, I tend to make hasty decisions and can easily make avoidable mistakes. I am excited for the future to come, and at the same time I am repeatedly needing to ground myself in the present moment, in the here & now. It's the ongoing dance between the vision of what I am wanting and acceptance for where I am at right now.
At the same time as all of this, there is the ongoing flood of news of what is going on in the world. There's the ongoing global climate catastrophe, the continuing horrors coming out of Gaza, the looming threat of nuclear war with Russia, ongoing threats of violence related to this year's U.S. Presidential Election and the possibility of a new Trump fascist dictatorship. Closer to home for me now, there was a mass shooting in Minneapolis recently close to an apartment building that I used to live at, as well as a bunch of animal abuses uncovered right down the street from where I live currently. My own sensitivity to and compassion for the suffering of others can sometimes seem like a curse to me, because I frequently get overwhelmed with grief and despair over all of these things. I hate this shit. This is not the kind of world that I want to live in.
My hope is to find other people with whom I can work with who more or less share the same kind of vision, purpose and values that I have who are interested and able to work together with me to create the kind of world that I want to live in. Or at the very least, create a little tiny social setting that reflects that new "world". This is what my vagabonding will be about. It will not be travel for the sake of travel, learning for the sake of learning. I want to find my people, to find my comrades, in person. And once we find each other, we would have far more capacity to create together the kind of world that we want.
