Resurrecting Community
What rises, what was buried, and what we must tend to.
Long before the Easter story was told, humanity was already telling it. Ishtar, the Babylonian goddess of love and fertility, descended into the underworld and returned — and the world bloomed again with her. Persephone rose from the dark earth each spring and the grain rose with her. Osiris was killed, gathered back together, and restored. These are not competing stories. They are the same story, told in different tongues across thousands of years, because the human heart has always known this shape: what matters most can be lost, and its return is possible.
Community is one of those things. Not the word — the word is thriving. It appears in app download pages, mission statements, subscription upsells. “Join our community.” Community as product. Community as the warm feeling that keeps the metric moving.
That is not what we are talking about. We are talking about the older, harder, more demanding thing: the experience of being genuinely known by people who are genuinely present. The kind of community that has a smell. That argues. That feeds you when you are sick. That notices when you are absent.
We did not lose community because people stopped caring. We lost it because we built a world that makes presence expensive and absence cheap.
Community was not lost passively. It was squeezed out — by urban designs that eliminated the front porch, by economic pressures that consume every hour, by technology engineered to capture attention rather than deepen presence. These are not acts of God. They are choices. They can be made differently.
So what does resurrection actually look like? Not policy, not platforms — the small, specific, almost embarrassingly simple things.
It looks like eye contact. A real one, held a beat longer than the transaction requires, that says: I see you, not just the role you are playing. It looks like a smile offered to a stranger on a sidewalk — not performed, but meant. These tiny acts are not sentimental. They are the atoms of community, the smallest unit of acknowledgment from which everything larger is built.
It looks like knocking on the door of the elderly neighbor and asking if anything needs doing. Carrying the groceries up. Sitting for twenty minutes because she hasn’t talked to anyone today and you have twenty minutes. This is not heroism. It is the baseline of what it means to live near someone rather than merely adjacent to them.
It looks like staying. Staying at the block party past your comfort zone. Staying in the difficult conversation. Staying in the neighborhood long enough to be known. Real community is built not in grand gestures but in the accumulated weight of showing up, again and again, in ordinary time.
The spring traditions knew this. Ishtar’s return was not automatic — it was called for, celebrated, met with ritual and intention. Persephone’s emergence was not taken for granted — it was tended, honored, received. Resurrection in every tradition requires the participation of the living. Someone has to roll away the stone. Someone has to be there when what was lost comes back.
On this particular Easter Sunday, that someone is you. The invitation is not abstract. It is the neighbor whose name you almost know. The face in the elevator you have been too distracted to meet. The friend you keep meaning to call.
What has been buried can return. But not by an algorithm. Not by an app. Only by the decision, made again today, to show up — to know and be known, to stay, to tend the small things until the larger ones become possible again.
Happy Easter.
Living In Community
Our true destiny…is a world built from the bottom up by competent citizens living in solid communities, engaged in and by their places.
– David W. Orr
Communities are the lifeblood of human existence. ‘No man is an island’, and we do well to hold this context. Sadly, our communities have been abused and destroyed by the usual suspects. This must change.
We’re already starting to see smart communities evolve that have a pioneering spirit and an ecological soul. Intentional communities, smart growth initiatives, the new urbanism and a host of other creative actions are pointing to ways we can live in greater health within our communities. We still have a long to go.
Until recently, the mainstream model for a city had changed little since the last major “innovation”—designing cities around cars. Ouch. Cities have been undergoing substantial changes in recent times, whether it’s designing smart growth and public transit like Portland, or determining how to reconfigure a city like Detroit, with great voids where neighborhoods and factories used to be. Like many “rust belt” cities, Detroit has lost substantial population and money due to globalization. And yet even there things are awakening.
Awakening
Cities are indeed awakening, as are communities everywhere. The Awakening, our grand journey into wholeness, is very much grounded in our communities. And while the most dramatic changes may be found in cities, rural, suburban and every other kind of community is experiencing this as well. It’s part of this massive shift to the World 5,0 culture.
These days many of our communities are virtual. Whether it’s an online group we’re part of, facebook, twitter or other social apps – the rich texture of our communal life is endless. The requirement is that we rebuild and recreate our communities to reflect our values and goals, wresting them back from corporate and government overlords who have ruined communal life with their dictum of profit at all costs.
Community blend
Another great realization these days is that we now well understand than our communities are in truth, ecologies – interwoven and interconnected arrays of people, land, architecture, natural resources, and all else that ties us together. At the same time, our particular local setting very much determines the kinds of communities we are part of. This is damn handy as it is in our local communities that we can have the most impact in effecting change. Local initiatives, local politics, local business and local health create the context for our local lives.
We’re finding our ground and empowering our selves, neighborhoods and communities. We’re taking a fresh look at priorities and possibilities.
By applying the principles of ecology and the World Five Platform, we find ourselves far less stressed, far more connected, and far more happy in our surroundings. How nice.