Community Connecting is a bit like planting trees, but more social. The goal is to write and live and act with such generosity and simplicity of purpose as Elzéard Bouffier. Each day, we go out to plant seeds and we expect a forest. We plant trees as a concrete act of hope--because we have hope and because we are bound up in our places. How can we treat each other and our landscapes with such hope?
The landscape--the reality and resources with which we construct our lives--also includes our systems and techniques. We live in an ecology of techniques and systems. Our social systems and administrative techniques are part of what we must listen to in order to suggest what is possible. Our engineers and our administrators constantly reconfigure our landscape, and we can as well through art, organizing, and craft. We are all part of the team that designs our world, and the more time we take to understand it, the better we can play our part. The question is what kind of a world are you building and who fits in it?
Natural systems are always underneath whatever we build, asserting themselves in the cracks and the befores and afters of our artifice and artificial systems. Perhaps a better way to say this is that whatever we design or build is surrounded by mystery. Weeds grow up in the sidewalk cracks and trees alongside abandoned houses. Whatever we do is part of something bigger. Our systems fit within existing systems. We put in the plumbing, but where does our water come from? Where does our trash disappear to? How about our food? Where do people go when they aren't in the scheduled program time? Where does the money go when we spend it and who made it worth an iPhone, a hamburger, or a house? Where have our buildings come from and where are our institutions going? What stories are shaping our lives and where are they leading?
These are just a few questions to begin a year of community connecting and seeking to know a place. If anyone would like to join me on a tree planting venture, literal or figurative, let me know and we'll try to make it happen.