 Neighborhood  |
Neighborhood
Joanna Marcy
I grew up in New York City. Over much of my life, I have found myself wanting to create community, though I think that I just wanted to do what made sense. So with four children, with my husband Fran and our family dog, I went to a kibbutz in Israel. We moved from a nuclear family pattern to a cooperative one. We sold one house and got another, started living with other people, and have been living cooperatively ever since. But that search for one community has mercifully left me.
Now there are a number of them. I see them as circles and they have some common characteristics. One is that they are community created by choice. I lack the skills of living and having to interact intimately for a long time with people I don't like. Community means dealing with some of the people you least want to be with. There is always one there, and I don’t have those kinds of skills at all. But I find that I’m generating community and enriched by it all the time by choice and around issues. My experience is that the strongest community comes through espousal of common purpose, a purpose beyond being in community, beyond looking soulfully into each other’s eyes to feel a togetherness, but rather to look at a task that must be done or something you want to do together. It’s like the clown in the circus who has many plates spinning at once. There are these strong communities where allegiance has taken hold, so then we can actually be difficult with each other and the loyalty is still there. We don’t have to like each other all the time, which is good.