IS: The dreaded C-word
Upcoming public events:
- Friday February 28: IS Connection Call
- Wednesday March 5: Limicon 2025 Opening Ceremonies
Community Hub calls for Season 17 members continue every Sunday through March 23. Last Sunday's session was called "10x Agency in our faces".
Last Thursday I wrote about The unbreakable vow (which, interestingly has become the most read edition of this newsletter ever!)
There's a particular c-word that I love to hate. No, I don't swear like that — the word I dread is community. It means... well, anything and everything! And so it means nothing. People use it to describe the set of people involved in facebook groups, housing developments, twitter clusters, churches, schools, causes, hobbies, entire fields — anywhere where people might feel a smidge of similarity or connection with one another. Yet with the root word also sourcing "commune" and "communitas" there's something deep about fellowship and togetherness there that's been obscured by the dilution of common over-usage.
I've been searching for a different word, the perfect what-are-we-to-each-other descriptive word for three years at least, and I've actually tried a bunch of other c-words: club, commons, collective, core, center, congregation, convening, cohering, connecting. Criminy! The current "community hub" label is a combo attempt to signal something like "yes community but, like, the real kind." Maybe you can help a linguistically-challenged brother out with this c-thing? (Not that it actually has any need to start with c...)
What is this c-thing "at the center" of this system? (the center of gravity at least, not the center of the depth onion) What are we to each other? We connect with each other much more deeply than text/media exchanges, but still less comprehensively than "intentional community" (with its very specific co-living/co-housing connotation). We build meaningful relationships, practice mutual aid, become spiritual friends, explore our edges, and learn reverently from our differences and parallax. It's powerful, enough so that inching back towards religious vocabulary feels attractive in getting at the transcendence and beauty of the thing.
(Side note: I have clarity on one potential ambiguity, "is Intentional Society a c-thing?" No - it has a c-thing, but the three spaces of IS visible for the last year hopefully has us clear that those are two different scope levels. Part of the problem with the smearing of "community" is that it could easily be interpreted as either of those scopes, or even beyond!)
I'm starting to lose the plot here, and it's getting late. I thought I would end up with some insight, and it hasn't appeared yet but this is a newsletter so you and I both get to experience the lack of resolution when I hit send now. Sometimes life is like that. Click.
James