MARCH NEWSLETTER

COMMUNITY BUILDING

March 2005 newsletter

When my mother married my father she moved from New York to Los Angeles to be with him. They moved into a home in a suburb fragrant with orange blossoms from what was left of the orchards. Although both my parents were ambivalent about their Jewish roots, being away from the familiarity of the kosher delis and subways and Jewish culture that New York is saturated with was disconcerting. There was one other Jewish family on the block where we lived but we were not close with them. My mother felt like a stranger in a strange land. In an attempt to heal her loneliness every Wednesday afternoon my mother invited women to join her in discussing her latest unearthing of psychologies and practices such as yoga, mediation and self-esteem building. This was in the 50's long before consciousness raising groups. Being a true New Yorker she never fully recovered from the loss of theater and intellectual stimulation that the city offered. She missed the pulse and rhythm of a city that balanced precariously between the old world and limitless possibilities, a city filled with people striving to stay alive, to make a difference, to be the best. In Los Angeles the living was easy. People did not struggle in the same way as they did in New York. It made for a sort of laxness of spirit. My mother felt lonely in Los Angeles and I was born into this loneliness.

When I met my husband we moved up north to Sonoma to start our live together. The only family I had up north was a brother who lived an hour away. He was in a relationship with a woman who was not comfortable with my brother and I being close. The relationship was strained and after they broke up he moved to New York. When things got tough between my husband and I there was no where to turn. I felt alone as my mother had felt alone with her babies. When division turned to divorce I was left in a strange land to raise my daughter by myself. Like my mother before me I tried to create a women’s support group. The group was called The Yellow House Community Project. We sponsored talks on things like organic gardening, alternatives to war, Waldorf education and set up play groups. I didn’t have a clue as to how to maintain a group and it eventually dissolved only to be reborn as my book Buddha Mom. Chronic Fatigue further strained what community support I had. My neighbors felt like alien beings to me. Not artists, not thinkers but people who worked on their cars while drinking beer on the weekends. We didn’t know how to relate to one another. My family far away, no connection with community nearby, without a clue as to how to reach out to those around me, I was achingly lonely.

Isn’t it interesting how we repeat patterns learned at our mother’s breast? This loneliness that runs like a deep river through my mothers life and mine, had it’s inception at the lonely peaks that were my ancestor’s icy dwelling places. Moving from country to country, kicked out of one place and then another, the Jews did not had a homeland. They needed to cling tightly to one another to form a community for survival. When they came to America survival no longer depended upon clinging to one another so they dispersed, acculturated, leaving their deep roots behind them. But the loneliness never left. This country, this America, is a land of people who left their homeland to seek a new life. All but the Native Americans, who were torn from the homeland they loved as well, left family behind to join this American experiment.

We are a lonely culture. We are a culture of addiction and distraction as we try to assuage our loneliness. This loneliness is never more apparent than when we become parents. The norm is nuclear family units. These units are energy inefficient since each family has to do work that would sustain many others, the work is no longer distributed amongst a group so we overwork. We live in our separate dwellings insulated from the glare of our neighbors. Sometimes we do not even know who our neighbors are. Even our babies are put in separate rooms, away from their source. This fundamental loneliness is one of the puzzles of our era.

How do we create community? How do we find like minded people to rejoice with, to cry with, to bring a pot of soup to when there is illness, to hold one anothers children when our arms are aching and unable to hold any longer? We are social animals, not like the Norwegian Brown rat who lives alone in its hovel of stones and twigs. We are meant to support one another. How do we hold true to our boundaries yet let others in? How do we learn to live with the difficult parts of one another? How do we forgive the inevitable stepping on toes that goes on whenever two unenlightened people get together? How do we celebrate our faith with one another when there are such different views all around us? How do we live in diversity and harmony?

These are questions that do not have easy answers but these are important questions to pursue. I know that a large chunk of my life’s work is to sit with these questions and, with others, find practical solutions. Yet, before practical solutions can be effective we each need to look deeply into our own loneliness and make friends with it. We need to make friends with our history and with our feelings of separation from source. After this I am confident that there are solutions because I have known people who are gifted at the art of creating community wherever they are. How much is creating community an inner healing process and how much is circumstantial? I invite you to join with me is asking these questions and trusting the wisdom that emerges. These questions cannot be solved by one person alone but by community. I sit with you in community around the kitchen table and open to our collective creativity. Perhaps in the asking of the question lies its own answer.

Jacqueline